This is a guest blog post by Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
In our previous blog post, we looked back at a tumultuous 2020, with particular emphasis on the enterprise need to accommodate a sharp rise in work-from-home (WFH) employees. The shift in where work was done had significant implications for networking and security requirements, forcing enterprise to adjust on the fly.
As 2021 dawns, the world looks forward to leaving the pandemic behind and returning to something approximating normal. But what form will the “next normal” take, and what will it mean for enterprise IT?
IDC foresees a next normal that will look different from the pre-pandemic normal. A hybrid workspace is materializing, with some employees reporting to the office, others working from home, and a significant complement working both at home and at the office. Again, this development carries implications for the network infrastructure that supports secure application delivery.
Let’s turn to the data for further insights. In the recent IDC Enterprise Networking Survey: Emergence of The New Normal, which was fielded in December 2020, enterprise respondents told us that about 20.5 percent of their employees worked from home before COVID-19, while nearly 50 percent worked from home as of December 2020; respondents anticipated that nearly a third of employees would work from home in a post-COVID world.
Conversely, enterprises reported that 62 percent of employees reported to the office before COVID-19 struck, with the proportion falling to 28.5 percent when the survey was conducted. They envisioned that about 47 percent would report to the office as we move beyond COVID-19. Finally, enterprises told us that 17 percent of employees had flexible working arrangements (both at home and in an office environment) before the pandemic struck, with that proportion reaching nearly 22 percent in December and expected to be at more than 20 percent in a post-COVID period.
It’s important to keep in mind that this survey included respondents from several industries, including those that have a significant share of employees who must be in an office or another onsite work environment to do their jobs. Industries with more knowledge workers tend to have more remote or hybrid employees. In those areas, some organizations are deciding that the geographic location of a knowledge worker should not represent a hiring constraint. While time-zone differences pose a limitation in certain scenarios and circumstances, a growing percentage of employers might be inclined to cast a wider geographic net when seeking the best available talent. Networking implications of this shift include accommodating a greater percentage of “branch-of-one” employees, who will require networking and security resources that allow them to perform at peak proficiency. Similarly, many organizations are moving toward an arrangement whereby knowledge workers will spend a portion of the week working from home, and a day or two each week working at the office on collaborative ideation and whiteboarding, tasks that many organizations perceive as less effective in the virtual realm.
CIOs and CTOs Enact Significant Changes in Wake of Pandemic
In the survey, IDC also asked respondents to identify changes to network operations made in 2020 that will become permanent in the post-COVID era. Nearly a third (32 percent) cited greater integration of network and security management, while about 30 percent highlighted improved support for WFH employees. More than 28 percent underscored a need for improved tools for network automation, visibility, and analytics, and about 25 percent cited an increased shift to more flexible (as-a-service) consumption models. Just under 25 percent of respondents pointed to the network implications of increased use of cloud applications (SaaS and IaaS), while 23 percent noted an increased focus on end-user application experience. A lesser percentage (18 percent) referenced an increased reliance on UC&C and other collaboration platforms.
CIOs and CTOs are realizing that those and other changes will be required to reap the full benefits of an engaged and productive distributed workforce. The WFH environment is different in many respects — socially and technologically — from the traditional office environment, which is architected and engineered to the purpose of work. As both applications and employees become increasingly distributed in the cloud era, each organization will have to give careful thought to how productive digital engagement can be established and maintained through optimized, secure network access to SaaS, IaaS, and on-premises applications for employees whose hybrid workspaces will represent significant departures from the fixed orientations of the pre-COVID period. For many organizations, these changes represent new challenges and responsibilities that will have to be met within the reality of budgetary and resource constraints.
With simple operations and comprehensive security as key criteria, organizations should consider investments in application-delivery infrastructure that integrates network and security policy enforcement and includes not only extensible SD-WAN gateways or appliances, but also client-based security (VPNs), and cloud-delivered security services (WAF, CASB, bot defenses, DDoS prevention). In addition, enterprises should bolster their full-stack visibility and analytics capabilities to ensure actionable insights across the network, resulting in increased availability and better application performance, as well as a more proactive posture in anticipating and resolving network and security events.
In the next blog post we’ll take a look at how enterprises can use IT cost-optimization strategies to heighten the effectiveness of their investments in application-delivery infrastructure.
