If you’re an IT leader, one of your focuses now should be on how you’ll maintain quick, seamless remote working for your workforce in the long term.
Many companies in Asia and nearby are expected to make remote work a long-term feature. Forrester has even predicted that 40 percent of APAC firms will make “anywhere work” permanent.
Business productivity and continuity now requires more than remote access via a home network – it means delivering as seamless a user experience as possible, often using low-latency and high-bandwidth applications across multiple pieces of consumer-grade IT hardware with little or no network visibility for IT managers.
Delivering an in-office network computing experience to a remote workforce is rapidly becoming the Holy Grail of enterprise IT, and hybrid enterprise networks are clearly the way of the future. But what are the long-term ramifications for hybrid networks and what do C-suite IT executives need to do now to future-proof their infrastructure and get the greatest return on their digital investments?
Harnessing AI
Your focus now should be on preparing to keep up with the daunting task of making remote work seamless for entire workforces, while simultaneously solving manageability and security issues.
For example, consider how you will:
- replicate a user’s on-site, or in-office experience
- address help desk call volumes, which often go through the roof due to issues with remote networking
- provision remote services and role-based access control quickly
- troubleshoot WAN
- integrate SASE to the network edge
- apply consistent security policies from the access edge to the WAN edge to the cloud
To achieve all this, you’ll need robust work-from-home solutions that provide flexibility through cloud usage while ensuring the network remains secure across lots of locations. Key capabilities will be security integration, automated orchestration, and WAN and SD-WAN optimisation.
The important enabler is secure, intelligent edge-to-cloud hybrid solutions that use AI to automate the network.
For instance, AI-enabled solutions can build on existing cloud-managed Wi-Fi capabilities like zero touch provisioning and role-based access control, with services such as intelligent policy-based routing, dynamic tunnel and route orchestration, and WAN troubleshooting tools.
AI-enabled automation can also extend SD-WAN and SASE to the network edge and manage it without the need for remote appliances.
Additionally, you can use identity-based traffic segmentation to ensure the application of consistent security policies from edge to cloud.
Optimising network architectures will help you support a wide range of business applications wherever they are hosted and accessed from. This will enable you to provide the same or similar levels of quality and service to remote workers as those working at the office.
One example is Aruba’s EdgeConnect platform, which enables secure, intelligent edge-to-cloud networking solutions using AI to automate the network, while harnessing data to drive business outcomes.
Aruba EdgeConnect was named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure for the fourth consecutive year. In its report, Gartner highlighted the overall robustness of the solution, and the scale and range of its applications. It singled out its “ability to see both real time and historical charts for packet loss, out of order packets, latency, and inbound and outbound throughput.”
Global real estate services giant eliminates network bottleneck at 200 sites
Cushman & Wakefield’s modernisation of its global network is a good example of how smart networking can greatly improve application performance across myriad locations.
A few years ago, the real estate services firm was experiencing a huge network bottleneck. The company had 51,000 employees in about 200 offices in 70 countries, and mergers and acquisitions had resulted in multiple networks and branch offices using expensive MPLS circuits to backhaul traffic to regional data centers. This was affecting application performance and degrading the quality of the end-user experience.
The solution was to adopt a cloud-first strategy, with application-aware architecture assuring network resources based on application requirements no matter where users are located – a much more global approach to connecting the business.
Cushman & Wakefield built a global SD-WAN using the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform, which was deployed at all branch offices and eight data centers. The company also implemented Unity Boost WAN optimisation and service chained EdgeConnect with Zscaler cloud security. The global SD-WAN is managed centrally using Orchestrator.
The result was an average application performance increase of 35 percent, helping users work more productively. The rollout also delivered consistent security policy enforcement, improved network resiliency and produced OpEx savings of $1.5 million per year.
A quick lesson learned - to ensure a consistently seamless and secure remote working experience you may need to modernise your network capabilities.
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is an established leader in secure, intelligent edge-to-cloud networking solutions. See how IT managers can use Aruba’s work-from-home offerings.
