Companies today are juggling an increasing number of digital demands — from a hybrid workforce to ever-increasing digital apps, as well as several others. According to our IT partner Ciena, there are five key concerns driving network strategies.
1. The Great Return to Office (RTO)
In many cases, staff returning to office are finding corporate networks lagging compared to fiber-to-the-home and other high-speed residential internet bandwidth they leveraged during the pandemic.
Some enterprises are finding “peak days” when hybrid workers coming into the office overload their networks, either degrading performance or forcing over-architected bandwidth to handle the spikes in load. Architectures supporting a bandwidth-on-demand model are being considered in these situations.
2. Digital App Explosion
The evolution in digital app technology continues to drive performance needs across many business sectors.
For instance, banking customers are accustomed to new, fully digital banking and payment players like Upgrade, Chime or Venmo. The digital wallet industry alone is expected to have over four billion users by 2025 .
Consumer expectations for digital, mobile and self-service options combined with security and reliability demands are making higher-performance network options a core strategy for many companies. The explosion of latency-sensitive middle and back office applications, many of those cloud-hosted, compound the bandwidth-thirsty network needs. Both leaders and laggards across industries must consider core network upgrades to support wider and deeper app deployments.
3. Multi-Cloud Architectures & Cybersecurity & SASE Cloud On-Ramps
Public, private and hybrid multi-cloud has become the standard for balancing cost with reliability, security, performance and scalability. Cloud on-ramps for mission-critical services are becoming an integral piece of both application performance and cloud-based security as more applications are either cloud-enabled or fully hosted in multi-cloud environments.
Traditional mesh architectures, designed for legacy multi-location connectivity, often have a bottleneck in accessing cloud services. This degrades the original performance of these architectures. Cloud direct connects or on-ramps coupled with SD-WAN over DIA and Ethernet could be an easy way to catch up to demand while future-proofing your architecture.
4. Cybersecurity and SASE
Cybersecurity is consistently one of the biggest concerns for those in Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) positions, regardless of industry. Typically topping the list for most organizations is Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and more specifically Security Service Edge (SSE).
5. New Technology Favors Updating Legacy Systems
New tech like artificial intelligence is further increasing network demands. AI is being adopted for risk management, operations and customer interactions, like chatbots.
These new technologies are enabling new capabilities, but only for those with the infrastructure to support those loads. We expect to see escalating clashes between legacy institutions and new digital-first competitors for market share. This will drive laggards toward network enhancements.
What Does All This Mean for IT Networking?
As companies contemplate these evolving factors in their market segment, the leaders are already driving network demand for competitive advantages today and future-proofing for tomorrow. Slow adopters will see the leaders prove out the technology strategies. They’ll also miss out on the gains and may get left behind as digital-first and tech-heavy players start to dominate the space.
Ready to learn more?
If you have questions and want to learn more about being well-prepared for these IT changes, get in touch with us for a no-obligation consultation.