Last year, many clients prioritised revenue generating priorities, leading to some intriguing insights, so with this in mind, we’ve highlighted three prevalent “in with” initiatives and three notable “out with” trends we’ve seen, along with the strategies being employed to navigate them effectively.
In with 1: Cost reduction and sustainability
A few years ago, the mere whisper of energy efficiency initiatives resulted with a rebuff on the grounds of it being too much bother for minimal return.
But as energy prices held high and companies chased new ESG targets, being able to understand at the socket level where and how energy is being pulled, which parts of the infrastructure are power hungry despite what their datasheets implied, as well as what typical looked like, became increasingly important for making data-driven efficiency decisions.
For this, our smart PDUs served as a drop in solution presenting clear visibility and trends of energy use, especially useful when evaluating tech that will burn less power.
This also enabled clients to accurately see where heat was being generated. This often led to further efficiency initiatives, like spreading the locations of power-hungry AI workload servers, showing where hot / cold aisle containment could better focus their HVAC cooling, and where rear door heat exchangers could remove heat at source.
And thanks to heat exchangers, one major infrastructure client says they now enjoy 11 months of free cooling each year. But extraction isn’t just a more sustainable way of dealing with heat, it also adds resilience to existing cooling methods.
At 34.8C, Monday 12th August was the hottest day of the year. This reminded infrastructure owners of the Google Cloud outages of July 2022 that were attributed to cooling system failures during the intense heat wave.
So, whether you’re looking to understand how much power each device uses, switch to more efficient equipment, need to reduce cooling costs and improve resilience, or want to appeal to eco-conscious clients, per-port monitoring and heat extraction are worth some serious consideration.
In with 2: Automation and differentiation
You may remember the news in the summer about CityFibre increasing test capacity by 300% and reducing test time by 99% with test automation, which we enabled with a solution consisting of traffic generation, layer 1 switching, and test automation software.
The automation solution enabled CityFibre to differentiate by accelerating time to market and future introductions of emerging technologies.
At the Connected Britain event in September, we spoke to many network owners and spotted a recurring theme; a strong desire to differentiate and unlock ROI in a competitive market.
This has led to lots of open dialogue and ideas, like test automation and energy efficiency, but also in automating the delivery of performance metrics that validate services, resolve issues quickly, and most importantly – protect customer satisfaction.
If you’re planning upgrades or looking to differentiate in 2025 and beyond, we’re happy to share more ideas and provide practical examples of successful outcomes we’ve helped to enable.
In with 3: Testing the perimeter
Whilst clients continue to invest in cyber security and perform essential pen tests, we’ve also seen desire to confirm and prove the measures in place are able to address vulnerabilities as soon as they emerge, and if they can’t, to be able to close those gaps before they’re exploited.
To support this, we’ve enabled them to safely automate the persistent testing of their security tools, not just against new threats, but also to understand where changes to security and network configuration have produced unintended vulnerabilities. And most importantly, enabling them to swiftly close the door on the newly found gaps and threats with their existing security protection tools.
Whilst we saw new priorities and directions coming in, we also saw some things start to decline – but still in support of the same objectives. So with that in mind, here are three “out with” trends we saw in 2024.
Out with 1: Nice-to-have product features
Clients’ appetite to buy features they don’t need at the point of purchase has never been smaller. And when it comes to clever features that didn’t necessarily spawn from market need, we saw some solutions miss out if our vendor partner was not open to switching off unrequired features in return for a lower price.
The consequence of this ‘all or nothing’ stance has been an important lesson for some of them, especially when trying to appeal to new clients. To use a predicable car analogy; why insist on a Rolls Royce when a Volkswagen will do? (As an independent provider with access to many options in the market, we were of course still able to fulfill our clients’ needs.)
Out with 2: Meetings – sort of
In 2024, it seemed like people were busier than ever. At times this made it harder to align calendars and see people in person.
Zoom calls have helped, but as we found at our tech workshops and events like Connected Britain and Home Office Security & Policing, meeting face to face leads to a greater understanding and faster resolution of clients’ challenges.
We think this trend is largely down to the need for us all to remain focused on what matters most. So when people attend a tradeshow or one of our educational workshops, we tend to see there’s a compelling reason in addition to staying up to date on the latest tech, industry compliance, or efficiency trends.
And surely that means, when we do meet face to face, we’re all optimising our time and reaching the required outcomes as efficiently as possible – which must be a good thing.
Out with 3: Suppliers
A longer term trend we saw gaining momentum in 2024 was for supplier consolidation. Many clients don’t want lots of suppliers on their books and can be reluctant to add new ones.
This is partly due to the amount of work involved with onboarding and retaining suppliers, but also now due to the heightened cyber risks from a growing supply chain.
We’re often reminded by the media of companies being breached, and in many cases, someone in the supply chain was exploited as the means to gain a foothold in another company.
So the more suppliers you have, the greater the perceived cyber risk for you and your clients.
We’re lucky, as our other division provides Managed Security Services to enterprises, legal firms, and utility providers, so our clients know that we’re taking suitable security steps here. It’s rare that a company specialising in test, monitoring, and efficiency, would also be part of a leading MSSP.
But more importantly, our clients are lucky because in Red Helix, they have one, technically competent supplier, that’s been helping major network and infrastructure owners to excel since 1984, who can deliver their needs for test, monitoring, efficiency, and cybersecurity, from a suite of more than 30 carefully selected, leading solution and service vendors.
We’re here when you need us. Happy new year from the Red Helix Technology Solutions Team!
