Zurück 
Over the past two decades we have seen a major shift in working patterns and models at organisations around the world. Intertwined—driven by those workforce changes as well as enabling them—we have also seen a complete rearchitecting of the IT systems that underpin our corporations. Both of these change agents have driven spiralling network costs in the name of maintaining and improving the performance of the essential applications for hybrid workforces.
Let’s be explicit about the changes to which we are alluding.
Firstly, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications now completely dominate the digital stack for businesses of all sizes, a change driven by vendors removing support for native on-premise applications in favour of cloud delivered services. And it isn’t just the applications that pivoted to an on demand service model. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) are both considered the “new” norm for data centre requirements. Like SaaS, these services have enabled businesses to migrate workloads away from private IT architectures sitting in corporate data centres to a pay-as-you-go platform for cloud compute, storage, and network virtualisation.
Alongside these tech changes we have witnessed wider changes in workforce behaviours, the principal of which has been the rise of hybrid work.
In short, our apps are no longer residing in easily ring-fenced data environments and our employees who are accessing these apps are no longer working from predictable “known” locations. So where does this leave our existing corporate wide area networks? Is it time to reassess their relevance for today’s data connectivity?
These dual transformations (tech and user) are huge, and with both of these in mind, it is important for organisations to re-evaluate their reliance on traditional network architectures for optimised application performance. Why?
- Commodity networks (home broadband, 5G) are now considered “good enough” for the vast majority of users. With some notable exceptions, we no longer need to plough money into hugely fat pipes connecting users to resources, but for many organisations these pipes between corporate locations are still being funded and, in some cases, sitting empty. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 45% of enterprise locations will use only internet services for their WAN connectivity1. We need to build enterprise infrastructures that enable a positive user experience and a secure connection, using ubiquitous and cost effective WAN connections.
- While many employees don’t need super fast and ultra resilient network connectivity, some always will. In fact, the popularity of hybrid work for knowledge workers will challenge these requirements for all users through the need to provide real-time communications over non-corporate and uncontrolled network connections. We need to rethink the economics and operational models of our high performing network connections.
- Having grown and adapted throughout the most recent period of change (did someone mention a pandemic?), today’s enterprise networks often look like something a mad scientist would build. They are riddled with hairpins to reach legacy security and in order to make use of legacy access technologies, like VPNs, to ensure remote users are secured using the same on-premise tools. There will always be economic or operational constraints that drive organisations to adapt what they currently have to make it work a little longer, but there comes a time to recognise when such shortcuts actually