This is a guest blog post by Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Given the difficulty of the year we’ve just left behind, we’re all looking to what the future will bring with a sense of cautious optimism. In this blog series, we will be looking ahead at how enterprise IT can reliably and securely deliver the applications that are at the heart of digital transformation. First, though, let’s take a brief glance back at the challenges entailed by a year whose passing most of us will not mourn.
During 2020, amid the persistent onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations worldwide were forced to provide unprecedented support for a distributed workforce. Work from home (WFH) became commonplace, and enterprise IT suddenly had to provide for an exponential number of “branches of one.”
The pandemic changed where work was done, but it didn’t change the fundamental nature of work or the underlying network and security technologies required to get it done. Despite inhabiting disparate WFH environments, employees still required reliable, responsive, and secure access to business-critical applications, including cloud-based productivity applications and real-time collaboration services.
This set of circumstances, as difficult as they were unanticipated, compelled IT departments to reimagine and deliver effective architectures and solutions to accommodate WFH scenarios. These solutions had to provide optimal engagement and digital experience, all the better to ensure productivity, while avoiding compromises to operational efficiency and security. Indeed, they had to be simple for WFH employees to implement; IT personnel were not available at each home to help out.
In IDC’s research during the pandemic, which included several rolling surveys of enterprises and other organizations worldwide, we found that WFH had become a ubiquitous reality. We also learned that WFH posed many edge-networking and security challenges that organizations struggled to resolve adequately with existing technologies.
Survey data provides further insights. In IDC’s COVID-19 Impact on IT Spending Survey, conducted in late May 2020, enterprise respondents indicated that just 6.3 percent of their employees worked from home before the onset of COVID-19. By the time of the survey, about 53 percent of employees were working from home, and respondent organizations estimated that nearly a third of employees would be working from home in 2021. Given what’s occurred since then, respondents might have been overly optimistic about the prospects of getting that many employees back into the workplace.
It’s clear that WFH brought new challenges as well as new IT priorities. In IDC’s recently concluded Enterprise Networking Survey: Emergence of The New Normal (December 2020), we asked enterprise IT respondents to identify the top three network challenges associated with having employees work from home. Security risks were cited by nearly 45 percent of respondents, while 42 percent referenced remote technical support. Nearly 37 percent cited unreliable home Wi-Fi, 34 percent stressed lack of ability to remotely manage home devices, and more than 32 percent mentioned inadequate support for videoconferencing.
The WFH phenomenon of 2020 also affected network capacity planning for remote access. Among the top challenges cited in that area were VPN concentrator/gateway capacity to ensure security, noted by more than 45 percent of respondents. Lack of network visibility was cited by a nearly equal number of respondents (45 percent). End-user access bandwidth was next at about 41 percent, along with network proxy servers at roughly the same percentage. WAN bandwidth for cloud applications was cited by 38 percent.
There’s no question that the rise of WFH brought new challenges and requirements to the forefront in 2020, but there are also opportunities to re-architect and re-engineer enterprise networks to better support more flexible hybrid working models. In a subsequent post in this series, we’ll look ahead to the rapidly evolving requirements posed by the “next normal,” in which WFH remains a prominent consideration in addition to an array of other scenarios where edge networking (including SD-WAN, network security, and application delivery) are essential components of a comprehensive solution.
