Why Connectivity Needs a Software Layer: Grant Kirkwood in Techstrong IT
Contrivian Founder & CEO Grant Kirkwood wrote for Techstrong IT on a question most mission-critical operators eventually run into: if there are more ways to connect than ever, why don’t operations feel any harder to take offline?
“Adding a second network is not a resilience strategy. It is a procurement decision that feels like one.
Fiber, 5G, LTE and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite have given mission-critical operators more ways to connect than at any point in the industry’s history. Very few of them would say their communications are proportionally harder to take offline. More choice does not produce more resilience, because the number of available paths was never the variable that controlled it. What matters is what decides between them.
That is a software problem, not a procurement one. Software provides visibility across every available connection, responds to changing conditions as they happen, and directs each application to the path best suited to it. Treating connectivity as a fixed asset to be purchased rather than a system to be operated is what leaves the resilience budget underperforming year after year.
This shift is already redefining how mission-critical communications are designed, deployed, and managed. Connectivity is no longer about providing access to a network. It’s about engineering an environment that adapts to operational requirements and keeps performing when and where it matters most.”
In the full article, Grant covers:
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Why more connections don't mean more resilience. A connection can be up and still be hurting the application running on it. Grant explains why availability and performance are two different things, and why LEO makes the difference easy to miss.
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What the software layer actually does. Measuring latency, jitter, packet loss and throughput across every path, matching each application to the connection that suits it, and moving traffic as conditions change.
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Deployment speed as part of resilience. After a disaster or at a temporary site, waiting weeks for a circuit isn't realistic. Grant makes the case for zero-touch provisioning and connectivity that's ready when teams arrive.
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From network access to engineered connectivity. Why the question is shifting from whether an organization has a network to whether its connectivity is engineered to perform.
