FiberLight survey shows 88% of execs are investing in high-bandwidth services

ATLANTA – FiberLight, LLC, a fiber infrastructure provider with more than 20 years of experience building and operating mission-critical, high-bandwidth networks, today released the results of a survey of 1,750 executive IT and corporate strategy leaders to better understand their investment strategy regarding high-bandwidth network services. Despite economic uncertainty, the findings of the study indicate that the market remains strong: nearly 88% of respondents said they are still investing in high-bandwidth network services and cited Data Centers, Cloud, and Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) are their top priorities.

Check out the High-Bandwidth Network Growth Survey Results

Driving this investment is the proliferation of emerging applications like 5G and IoT, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. Other key factors include the continued growth of remote and hybrid work models and the surge in cloud computing needs where enterprises are migrating all or a portion of their applications to the Cloud.

Many organizations today are either running their business from the Cloud or moving toward running their business from the Cloud. Cloud-based software is essential for these organizations, giving businesses flexibility for their employees to work from anywhere while handling the complexities of redundancy, software upgrades, and data storage. The Cloud applications executives reported hosting include Unified Communications and Collaboration (Zoom, Webex, Teams, etc.: 22% of respondents), Security SaaS (22% of respondents), CRM SAAS(18% of respondents), and other SaaS applications.

A little more than 43% of executives said that their investment will focus on Urban Metro geographic areas, while just 27% said their investment will focus on Rural areas, and about 29% will focus on Suburban areas. This reflects the fact that rural areas continue to be underserved. In today's dynamic market where, between remote work, hybrid work, and return-to-office initiatives, people are working from anywhere in the world, and organizations need fast, highly-secure, and reliable options which are not often available in rural areas. These options include connectivity to their own data center, access to multiple cloud service providers, and private network connectivity like dark fiber or private ethernet networks.

When it comes to connectivity upgrades, executives responded that their most pressing priorities are security upgrades, followed closely by speed/low latency connectivity upgrades. Because much of today’s organizational information and data resides in the Cloud, this type of flexibility drives the need for greater security.

FiberLight, a fiber infrastructure provider that builds and operates high-bandwidth networks, conducted the survey in December 2022. The 1,750 survey respondents comprised IT and corporate strategy executives who primarily work for companies in the technology software/services sector, although respondents represented companies from a variety of industries. Most respondents work at companies with at least 500 employees. Most respondents (41%) said their business uses a Hybrid Cloud model to support applications––a mix of on-premises data center components and cloud-hosted data center components. A little more than 36% use a Cloud Data Center model.

Read the full press release here.

FiberLight, LLC