Enterprise networking trends in 2021: Preparing for the new normal
if you're a member of an it team you've probably gotten the hand of supporting your remote workforce by now but as we prepare for the new normal and the future of work what should you be considering as employees return to office stick around hey everybody welcome back to today in tech i'm julia beauchamp and i'm here with brandon butler senior research analyst for enterprise networking at idc and we're going to be discussing what is in the pipeline for enterprise networking in 2021 so brandon thank you so much for joining me today yeah hi juliet thanks so much for having me it's great to be here so brandon if you could just give us a quick quick overview of where we are now and where we've and how we've gotten here over the past year now sure yeah so it's a really exciting time in enterprise networking right now you know obviously 2020 was a really dynamic year we saw the you know covid um uh you know pandemic which was really tough for a lot of organizations and it really required organizations to make a really quick shift in in march of 2020 where uh they were sending a bunch of their workers home right so a bunch of workers used to come into the office every day then businesses had to support these workers now working remotely and so that caused a lot of organizations to rethink sort of what does my network need to look like to support those remote workers and so i think that there were a lot of solutions that were put into place that were maybe sort of band-aid solutions to help support those remote workers and now as we're in 2021 um organizations are thinking about two things they're thinking one i'm gonna have workers coming back to my office soon so what does my network need to look like to support those workers who are coming back to the office and then number two i'm going to have a higher percentage of workers who are going to be working remotely all the time now and so how do i take those maybe band-aid solutions that i put in place last year how do i make those business class how do i make those enterprise grade to ensure that the employees who maybe aren't coming back into the office every day can still be productive and have good experiences on the network exactly like you mentioned the future of work is going to be it feels sort of like a mix of what we had before kovit and what we're dealing with now there's going to be a hybrid work option for tons i mean millions obviously of employees so i'm wondering what it needs to be doing now to prepare to support their future hybrid workforce and also those employees who either a need to be in the office every single day and they are going to be there perhaps come summer or fall and be those employees who like i mentioned are going to be working a little bit from home a little bit in the office but certainly more in the office than they are now yeah certainly uh it shops are gonna have to support both of these personas right you're gonna have folks who are coming back into the office and then folks who are working remotely so why don't we talk about sort of what that future office is going to look like yeah specifically from a networking perspective so you know as businesses are going to be welcoming welcoming employees back to the office like you said hopefully this summer maybe this fall it'll be be a time hopefully this year where workers are going to come back how is that office space going to look different well one thing that we've thought about is that we've seen this increased reliance on these uh video communication platforms of course zoom and webex and teams and we think that that's here to stay so even as you have employees back in the office you're still going to be running most of your meetings via these online collaboration platforms and so what does that mean for the network these are really high bandwidth applications that chew up a lot of bandwidth on the network users expect really low latency connections so that you don't have any jitter on these video phone calls and and and audio and so one of the things that we've been thinking about is that organizations are looking to ensure that their network is able to meet the demands of these workers who are going to rely on these collaboration tools even when they come back into the office and so there are a couple technologies that we're specifically looking at from a networking specific perspective um for example wi-fi six so this is um one of the new standards in wi-fi that we saw come about in the last couple of years and we're starting to see uh it shops and and organizations really try to start to embrace wifi6 as this next generation wifi platform and then as you as you look to deploy wi-fi six maybe you're looking to deploy um a higher-end wired connection to support that wi-fi environment so we're seeing things like multi-gigabit ethernet switching come about where folks are moving beyond just you know one gigabit uh ethernet switching looking at 2.5 and 5 gig and even uh 10 and 25 gig ethernet switching within the campus environment so there's a number of technologies that we see organizations starting to think about right now of you know when i have workers coming back to the office i may not have as many workers in the office as i did pre-covid but those workers who are in the office like i said are going to be using these high bandwidth apps and so i need a network that can support those applications well that raises the question too of these workers who are going to remain working from home or in some capacity or perhaps obviously the the pandemic really amplified the fact that workers can now live anywhere because a lot of organizations have these remote these remote work policies and they're they're bulked up enough now to support workers pretty much anywhere in the world so not only are you going to have now workers who um are preferring to stay home a few days a week if not every single day but you may now also be supporting brand new employees who have never even been in your office that were hired remotely and are going to continue remotely because they don't live near your office what sort of things should it be preparing for now to support these employees certainly now as they're working from home but how can those changes be how will those changes still be important in a post-coveted world yeah it's a great question and one that we get fielded a lot here at idc and one of the ways that i think about it is this term that we've come up with called the branch of one and so what do i mean by that you know in an enterprise networking context we've in the past supported branch offices you sort of have your headquarters you have your campus environment and then you have a branch environment and these branch offices you know think of a retail location or a gas station or something like that that may have been a branch location that you had to support now what do these branch locations look like they are a branch of one right you have single employees who you need to support on your network so that's what we mean by the branch of one and and this idea of supporting remote workers um you know folks who are going to be a remote full-time or even folks who are going to be coming into the office a couple days a week but then also working remotely a couple days a week like i said i think that there were some band-aid solutions that that organizations put into place last year you know maybe they had a vpn that they had for their employees to be able to securely connect into their applications um maybe there was uh some sort of uh cloud-based uh security platform that you used um to be able to uh do two-factor authentication for example but these systems were sort of designed to support a certain level of or number of workers working remotely during the covet era that number shot way up so one of the things that we saw was um organizations have increased their reliance on cloud-based platforms for managing their networks because of the scalability that a cloud-based platform enables so when you use a cloud-based platform you can scale it up and then potentially scale it back down as you need to so you know one other interesting point was we did a survey late last year um asking about the user experience that folks are having while working remotely and there were some pretty scary numbers around there up to 70 percent of respondents said that they are having uh network or application performance issues multiple times a week and you know i think this will resonate with a lot of people who may have you know not a great internet connection or there's a lot of people using the internet at home and so we really think that there are some some tools that organizations can think about deploying to remote workers um you know not everyone is going to need the same tool but there could be some software-based tools that could provide optimized connectivity to certain business applications or cloud-based applications we're starting to see some organizations actually help pay for you know broadband internet connectivity to remote workers help subsidize the cost of that internet connection um and then in in some sort of higher end use cases you know think about for executives or financial traders or healthcare workers where you know if connectivity failure is not an option for you then there are some hardened devices like enterprise class devices that we're seeing rolled out to some of these users that you know provide a separate wi-fi network on your home that uses the same credentials as what you would use in the office or having a tool like a sd-wan gateway that would provide really secure and reliable connection to these cloud-based applications that are being used so we see these like enterprise grade tools being rolled out to a certain class of workers um who who need that sort of connectivity so i think we're in the early stages here of businesses trying to figure out you know what are these tools that i need to put in place for my remote workers to ensure that they can be productive sure that makes sense because at first when you were saying this i was wondering how is this different than what enterprises were already doing obviously a year ago now enterprises sort of had to get on this immediately there really wasn't an option and perhaps now they have had the time they've been able to reflect and they can be and i t teams can be a lot more thoughtful about what tools they're rolling out and to whom and that kind of brings me to my next point and question for you which you you've mentioned now obviously there's a much heavier reliance on cloud applications whether it's you know you're using teams all the time or you're using salesforce you're relying on these perhaps a lot more heavily and you're also using them all from home so i'm wondering how enterprises now are using the cloud perhaps differently than they did in 2020 and how are they going to continue to use the cloud differently into 2021 um yeah it's another great question and you know based on that survey that i said that that we had looked into uh in december one of the top things that we saw from that survey was that businesses had actually increased their reliance on cloud-based applications last year during during 2020 and so why is that well there's a couple reasons as you said these these collaboration tools are increasingly hosted in the cloud so that's one way that we saw the increased use but we also saw organizations using cloud-based applications for business resiliency and business continuity so if you have a an application that you were hosting internally um then if you weren't going into the office every day to service that if there's some sort of issue with the application maybe you don't have an opportunity to go into the office to fix that and so we really saw kovit accelerate this trend of folks moving to the cloud as a place to to host applications like i said for for resiliency and continuity so i think there's been a number of ways that we've seen organizations um you know obviously cloud isn't new this has been a multi-year journey that organizations are looking to to more fully embrace the cloud for a number of applications and use cases but we really thought kovit accelerated that trend in a lot of ways and so now i think the question is that i have these applications that are hosted in the cloud and by the way it's not just one cloud it's it's it's a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud world you know how do i optimize my connectivity to these cloud-based applications how do i ensure that i have solid connectivity across these multiple clouds and how do i ensure that my remote employees and my employees are in the office have these optimized connections into the cloud as well so there's a number of different layers that we're seeing and of of things that folks are really taking an increased interest in right now in 2021 as they're looking to sort of firm up and put in put into more enterprise class solutions into place compared to these sort of solutions that were put in into place sort of quickly last year yeah and i'm wondering too about this well you mentioned the inability perhaps to be able to go into your office and um deal with whatever on-prem systems you have there and to close out i'm curious about this concept of sort of the using the cloud to manage networks that seems like an interesting concept that is especially applicable now when perhaps not everyone on your it team is working from home it's it's obviously a critically important part of the business and maybe you've got a team member or two in the office every day that can fix something on-prem if something goes absolutely haywire but i would imagine it's especially useful now when you might have a lot of your it team working from home still and perhaps you may continue to have them to work from home yeah certainly yeah this whole idea of using the cloud not just as a place to host applications and um and to really access applications that you're using for your business but like you said using the cloud is a platform for managing your enterprise network this is again something that we've seen it's it's been a multi-year trend that we've seen of organizations increasingly using the cloud as a management platform and you know specifically i'm thinking about things like cisco meraki for example or juniper mist these are some of the companies that we see that and hp aruba is another example extreme uh networks and and ruckus all these companies have cloud-based platforms for managing their their wi-fi and ethernet switching and sd-wan sort of your campus networking environments and yeah this is something that we've also seen pick up um after last year organizations are looking for these cloud-based platforms to provide more centralized management to provide more resiliency so you don't have to like we said go back into an office to manage some of these networks we also see these cloud-based platforms being a great way to access some of the sort of latest and greatest and cool new technology that we see in the networking market if you think about the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help you to understand what's happening in your networking environment and maybe if there is a problem provide some what we call guided remediation to if there is a problem here's how you fix it we see some of these more advanced automation tools being rolled out first in these cloud-based platforms and so that can be another driver for for folks using the cloud as a management platform so just to provide us sort of where are we now we expect that about a third of the wi-fi uh new wi-fi installments that are done in 2021 are going to be managed from cloud-based platforms and just to give you an idea over the next four years we expect that number to rise to about half so again this is something that we saw kovid accelerate last year and it's something that we expect is going to be increasingly important into the future as well and julia i just want to mention one other thing that uh you know a lot of these trends that i talked about are things that we're going to be covering at our idc directions conference this is a virtual conference that we do at idc every year and this year it's going to be on march 19 or sorry march 9th and march 16th um i'm going to be specifically talking about the branch of one concept that we talked about and supporting remote workers and i'd certainly encourage folks to tune in virtually either uh live or on demand to check out a bunch of great content that we have at idc for our directions conference this year fantastic well thank you so much britton i do have one last question for you which relates to managing your network in the cloud you say that a third in 2012 of new installations in 2021 are going to be managed in the cloud i'm kind of wondering about the other two-thirds what about them and why would they why would someone opt to not manage their network in the cloud so if you've got an it team that's now dealing with you know a new office space or they're dealing or they're going to be converting their office space to support their in person and remote workers what's the what's the drawback i guess sure so though the sort of traditional way that organizations have managed their uh campus networks has been using these on-premise management systems and platforms and so that's sort of been the way that folks have done this for a long time and this cloud-based management platform is sort of a a new way if you will that organizations are are increasingly thinking about managing their platforms but yeah there's a lot of advantages to using an on-premise based system as well so if you are you know have an i.t team that is really good at managing that network you have a dedicated team for your wi-fi environment for example who's able to optimize that wi-fi environment to make sure that it's running you know the best that it can and you have a team of engineers maybe who are you know managing that network on a day-to-day basis maybe you have a team that's you know invested a lot of resources into training and education um around managing these networks those organizations maybe don't see a huge need to use a cloud-based platform i think it's the organizations that we see using a cloud-based platform fall into a couple categories number one folks who have a very distributed network so if you're managing a lot of sites having to you know manage each of those sites individually can be can be tricky if you're using an on-premise system having a cloud-based platform allows you to sort of centrally manage a bunch of these distributed sites um and then the other one would be uh lean i.t if you will so if these are it folks who wear a lot of different hats if you're not just managing your wi-fi environment but you also have to manage you know your security and you also have to manage your your broadband and mpls connections in your wide area network and you sort of wear a lot of hats as an i.t professional then maybe the cloud
could offer you some advantages for offloading some of the sort of day-to-day management that you need to do on a uh for your network and sort of rely on on a cloud-based platform to to take some of that heavy lifting off so again it's it's an area that we see continuing to emerge and and growing and it's certainly something that we're going to be watching closely this year great well thank you so much brandon i think that these are some really valuable insights as it teams prepare to have and support some in-person employees and also like we mentioned to continue to support remote employees and i think there's going to be definitely a lot on it's plate um to juggle these two groups of people and hopefully some valuable lessons here for them so thank you so much again brandon i really appreciate it yeah it was great to be here thanks for having me and thank you all so much for watching this episode of today in tech if you liked this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel hit the bell icon in the corner so you're notified every single time we post a new video if you have any questions about network management or where you think enterprise networking might go in 2021 please do leave a comment below really interested to hear from you and if you have any specific questions i'll get back to you or i'll get back to you on brandon's behalf thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
2021-03-13 19:24
