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“Where’s your app? Where’s your data?”
For a long time, if you needed to know where your applications or data were, the answer was clear: it was always either on-premises or in a branch. Universally, almost regardless of organization size, infrastructures were contained, and visible within a defined boundary—you have a data center, a network, a branch, a user. Even if you had a few users connecting by VPN while traveling or working from home on occasion, it didn’t really impact network performance or introduce undue risks. Life was pretty good.
Then the cloud happened, and the answer to “Where’s your app? Where’s your data?” became a bit hazier than it had been. An application might still be in the data center. But sometimes it was in the cloud. Sometimes it was software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). But today’s mystery didn’t get scary for networking teams until about a year ago.
When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, virtually all users left on-premises overnight to work from home. Without the majority of users existing within an on-premises network boundary, the question of knowing where apps and data reside suddenly became even harder to answer.
The COVID user exodus was like a bomb going off—wherever each of those users landed (like shrapnel) essentially became an edge of the new network perimeter. And networking teams immediately had to solve a whole new world of problems—from connectivity, to performance, to security—within what we might call their new Network Bermuda Triangle of