Business Customers Want One Trusted Partner

Digital transformation for business customers can no longer be reduced to buying an individual ICT service or increasing network capacity. Companies increasingly want communications infrastructure, cloud, data centres, systems management and security to operate as a coherent whole. “Business customers have long stopped talking only about connectivity, or only about cloud and artificial intelligence; they are looking for real partners,” Marijana Bačić, Management Board Member and Chief Operating Officer for Business Customers (COO Business), tells ICTbusiness Media - ICTbusiness.info. Such a partner, she argues, has to understand the customer’s broader digital ecosystem and take on part of the complexity that is increasingly difficult to manage through a large number of separate suppliers.

Bačić says companies are focusing more strongly on their core business and entrusting parts of their technology environment to partners able to combine multiple layers of infrastructure and services. “It is much simpler for them to talk to one trusted partner than to an entire set of suppliers,” she says. Data and communications infrastructure thus become the foundation on which more advanced services are built.

Infrastructure in this context includes not only data links but also the data centres where business systems run and data are processed. “That is our bloodstream for business customers,” Bačić says. On top of that foundation, providers can deliver cloud services, data migration, systems maintenance, IT outsourcing and cybersecurity. The combination illustrates how far the relationship between telecom providers and business users has moved beyond traditional connectivity.

The shift is accelerating because technology changes faster than the physical infrastructure required to support it. “Technology changes much faster than physical infrastructure,” Bačić says. Technology companies and industries with mature IT departments tend to recognise this first, particularly regulated sectors that have to balance innovation, compliance and cost optimisation.

She cites financial services as one of the leading sectors. Croatia banka, she says, runs its entire IT environment from the provider’s data centre through an outsourcing model. That arrangement had to meet strict Croatian National Bank requirements, including data-centre certification, business continuity, redundancy and other parameters. “The financial industry really is a frontrunner, alongside technology companies such as ours,” Bačić says.

She sees greater room for progress among medium-sized and small companies. They often lack the internal capabilities of large enterprises while facing the same technology shifts and increasingly serious security threats. “We see it as our responsibility to educate the market about the possibilities so that smaller companies can keep pace with trends and remain competitive,” she says. Services that are financially and organisationally accessible to smaller businesses are therefore becoming an important part of the market.

Cybersecurity is also moving from a technical issue to a business priority. Laws and European directives have accelerated awareness, but Bačić says real incidents and tools that make attacks easier are even stronger drivers. “Laws and directives have only pushed the economy further in that direction,” she says, adding that smaller companies are much more educated about cyber risk than they were in the past.

She highlights the security operations centre in Zagreb as a central part of that model. According to the figures she provides, it protects more than 200 companies and monitors more than 65,000 endpoints. “We have around fifty local experts, but we also have access to the knowledge of roughly two and a half thousand people across the Deutsche Telekom Group,” Bačić says. The advantage is that intelligence from incidents and threats in different markets can be applied to local defence.

Security as a service is particularly important for small and medium-sized businesses. The idea is to make advanced capabilities that would otherwise be financially unrealistic mainly for large enterprises available through a monthly service model. “We make it easier for small companies to access something that would otherwise be financially out of reach,” she explains. Expertise, tools and monitoring can therefore be shared across many customers instead of every small business attempting to build its own security team.

Bačić says adoption is visible even in segments where strong demand for cybersecurity might once have seemed unlikely, from kindergartens to small trades and other businesses. The reason is straightforward: as operations become more digital, exposure to attack increases. Business customers are therefore expecting less of a standalone product from technology partners and more continuous management of infrastructure, security, and the changes introduced by new technologies.