Changing the network to support the normalization of telecommuting

 Before the new crown outbreak, teleworking was more like a perk than a way of doing business. Now, tens of thousands of people work from home, many of whom will never return to the office. This new reality means that corporate networks must evolve.

　　The Enterprise Management Association (EMA) recently surveyed 303 IT professionals and published a study, "Enterprise WAN Transformation: SD-WAN, SASE and Pandemic. The study found that prior to the outbreak, an average of about 14 percent of enterprise employees were working from home on a regular basis. More than half of these organizations expect the work-from-home population to continue to rise after the pandemic ends. This permanent shift means that IT organizations will need to adapt their network architecture and network operations.

　　Evolving Networks with SD-WAN and SASE

　　Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) will be important technologies to support the shift to telecommuting network architectures. one of the fundamental elements of SD-WAN is the creation of an overlay of secure site-to-site connectivity on any network. In theory, SD-WAN can be extended to the home office, and the enterprises in our study recognized this opportunity. 84% told us that SD-WAN can support business continuity during a pandemic, and that the primary opportunity for SD-WAN is through the extension of the SD-WAN overlay to enable secure connectivity in the home office.

　　Many study participants also told us that they want to apply the WAN remediation capabilities of SD-WAN solutions to their home offices. For example, certain vendors are offering forward error correction on their devices, which could improve the experience for home office users. In the future, certain vendors may introduce software clients with such features.

　　SASE is an emerging technology that will also support new network architectures. the concept of SASE is still emerging, and few vendors offer complete solutions, but right now it is best described as an integration of cloud-delivered SD-WAN, secure remote access and network security. In our new study, 82% of IT professionals believe SASE can support business continuity during an outbreak. The main opportunity is secure remote access.

　　EMA has observed that many SD-WAN vendors continue to evolve their solutions during a pandemic. Some expanded coverage by discounting equipment or introducing new software clients. Other vendors have accelerated the move to SASE by integrating secure remote access solutions with SD-WAN.

　　Evolving Network Operations

　　On the operations side, EMA found that IT organizations are prioritizing visibility into two key points that support the home office user experience. First, 67% of IT organizations will focus on application health and performance. This focus makes sense, as many IT organizations already have the ability to monitor their applications, especially those hosted within their own data centers. Cloud applications, especially SaaS applications, may require new tools and processes. For example, as conferencing applications like Zoom become more important, IT organizations may gain new tools to directly monitor such SaaS services.

　　Another focus for monitoring the telecommuting user experience is the availability and performance of the local Internet Service Provider (ISP). During the epidemic, ISP performance has been inconsistent, with remote workers competing for bandwidth with family members and neighbors. In addition to telecommuting, distance learning, telemedicine, online gaming and streaming services have all experienced historical peaks that have strained ISP networks. Looking ahead, IT organizations will need visibility into these networks to protect the home office user experience.

　　ISP visibility will require new enterprise-class monitoring tools to extend support for home workers. Troubleshooting processes that rely on end users running speed tests on their local ISPs will not scale. For example, an IT organization may have hundreds of users affected by the same ISP issue at the same time. Instead of collecting the results of individual speed tests, IT administrators would benefit from an end-to-end view of ISP performance, and they could proactively identify problems before end-user productivity is disrupted. Tools that passively monitor Internet traffic can help in this regard, or active monitoring tools that generate test traffic from agents on client devices can provide a more centralized, systematic alternative to tests performed by individual speed testing applications.

　　The EMA believes that enterprise networks will grow considerably when they become popular, and not just in home offices. Data center networks, but of course campus and branch office networks as well.

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