“Today’s internet solutions need to be built for network diversity, resiliency, and performance.” – Victor Cardona
Victor Cardona, a Global Business Technology Strategist & Advisor and singular figure in the Metro New York, New Jersey, and Greater Philadelphia business community. Despite his youth, Victor has been a highly lauded executive in the IT, telecommunications, marketing, business development, and real estate fields. With the unique ability to understand enterprise needs and objectives at the macro and micro level, Victor is capable of generating large scale revenue opportunities in every position he has filled.
Victor has honed his vast arsenal of management and business skills while working with some of the most esteemed companies in the country. He serves, and has served in various advisory roles at Comcast Corp, the Bisnow Data Center Division, Track With Ease, One Communications, and is currently serving as a President of Jireh Investment Group. His unbroken line of professional successes has made Victor synonymous with hard work, competitiveness, professionalism, and an unparalleled networking machine.
Network Diversity
The old legacy telephone companies have owned the last mile of infrastructure that is underground for the last 60-70 years. The cable companies started to develop coax cable which will be diverse from the legacy systems. Built for network diversity, resiliency, performance, and in today’s competitive marketplace, these customers can’t afford any downtime. C-level executives are starting to understand the importance of a diverse network and that they can’t put all of their eggs in one basket.
Disaster Recovery
The Cloud is really changing the way companies operate. They are even starting to move a lot of their data-intensive applications and workflows there. They are expecting these resources and applications to perform like they are hosted in their office locally, with the intention of no delays, interruptions, or downtime for their users. Comcast specifically is providing Ethernet-based services over their fiber platform to seamlessly integrate a lot of their off-premise resources into this chain (for example: servers, storage, business continuity, disaster recovery). It acts like these resources are on-site due to the dedicated internet connections.
Comcast is leveraging secure Ethernet services directly to all of the major hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Cloud. By doing this, they can connect directly to your infrastructure and no longer have to go through public internet. It is not just enterprise organizations that are looking at this technology, but also mid-market to small & medium-sized businesses that can take advantage of this technology.
Reducing Operating Expenses
Moving phone infrastructure to the cloud is an operational expenditure that now can be centrally managed, which saves hundreds of thousands of dollars that were originally being spent in this area for organizations to maintain it. At Comcast, because they are building on their fiber, they absorb a lot of that cost. They ask for a term from a contract standpoint, but in return, they provide all of that infrastructure.
Because Comcast owns the network that they are building on, they see a reduction in cost from a monthly services standpoint. Where they see some of their competitors providing lower bandwidth at higher rates, since they own the fiber, they are able to reduce the operational expenditures by absorbing that initial infrastructure build-out costs and in turn, providing more bandwidth for less. Building private networks, displacing old Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, and owning the last mile really helps set Comcast and their customers up for success.
The last mile is the piece of glass, fiber, or coax from the phone pole to the customer demarcation point (DMARC).
There are 5-10 other providers that don’t own but instead resell to other providers for that last mile. It is important for the customer to know who owns that last mile, especially when it comes to diversity of your network.
What are the top areas where you are seeing the biggest change in this industry?
1. Technology is changing at a rapid pace, but IT budgets are staying stagnant.
2. With the shift to cloud technologies and more users accessing the internet with more data (files/images/etc.), the need for more bandwidth to keep up with required workflow efficiency’s is extremely important.
3. Digital transformation initiatives: A strategic initiative is to think digital first and provide the best customer experience to your customers.
At Comcast we have a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) security platform that identifies, mitigates, and prevents these types of attacks by sending the traffic to our scrubbing centers to analyze. Once at the scrubbing center, the affected traffic is removed and unaffected traffic flows through. We also alert the customer when these attacks are happening.
