Network Demand Has Changed, Here’s How to Keep Pace

This blog is part of the ongoing “I&O Perspectives” series, which features insights from industry experts about the impact of current threats, networking, and other cybersecurity trends.

In today’s business landscape, the relentless digital innovation of the past five years—driven by a shift to hybrid working and widespread cloud app adoption—has elevated network performance to a vital cornerstone of business operations. As security and access requirements evolve, maintaining an organization’s network is no small feat. Many IT teams are grappling with legacy hardware that cannot keep up with advancements in security requirements or increased complexity of access requests. To truly achieve safe, secure access, organizations must rethink their approach and provide greater visibility and control to networking teams based on changing user traffic patterns, while also complying with required security standards.

Today’s workforce is characterized by online collaboration and hybrid working. Organizations have to support thousands of unique network access requests from various devices and from countless locations. Employees expect to access corporate networks and cloud applications with the same ease from a coffee shop on their mobile as they do via a company laptop in their office. On top of the increase and variety of network traffic, there is a demand for more seamless and personalized user experiences than ever before. 

This modern world is a stark contrast to the days where applications safely existed in the company data center. Back then, organizations would use secure tunnels that sent employee traffic to the corporate data center. Now that applications exist on the cloud–and employees demand access from anywhere–it is illogical to channel that employee traffic into a corporate data center through a VPN and back out again to the internet. However, whether because of a lack of budget or appetite for transformation, many IT teams are stuck using this old method. They are forced to maintain established legacy technology and buy expensive point products to help keep pace with demands of the modern enterprise. 

Legacy VPN can overcomplicate infrastructure, create laggy user experiences that only worsen as organizations scale and, more worryingly, it creates inefficient traffic routing with a lack of visibility, meaning that IT teams have a tough time diagnosing network issues. Crucially, VPNs are also a huge security risk, with multiple vulnerabilities and victims already acknowledged globally this year.

To tackle this problem, Netskope offers a transformative approach by removing the need for legacy hardware altogether and bringing cloud access closer to the end users. Netskope One, for example, is a unified cloud-native platform offering converged networking and security services, granting unparalleled visibility to network traffic and application performance.

This approach isn’t just about solving immediate challenges; it’s about future-proofing network infrastructure for long-term success. Rather than perpetuating the cycle of hardware life cycle management and patchwork solutions, Netskope offers a holistic on-ramp to the internet that prioritizes agility, scalability, and resilience. Netskope NewEdge network, for example, is the world’s largest private SASE cloud spanning over 74 regions worldwide, each powered by a full compute stack for single pass inspection, to ensure security is deployed wherever and whenever it is needed. It leverages a zero-trust security approach to gather comprehensive risk telemetry and deliver unmatched contextual awareness to enable adaptive, least-privileged access to users, devices, applications, and data. While providing the fastest  end-to-end round trips from the user through the NewEdge network to web, cloud, SaaS and private app destinations–ideal for the modern enterprise.

By embracing the power of enhanced visibility, performance and access control, Netskope empowers networking teams to think beyond the limitations of legacy technologies and embrace the cloud-first digital future.