The rapid spread of COVID-19 has caused massive, enduring shifts in business operations. The pandemic has fundamentally transformed business operations, IT management and security for organizations of all types and sizes across the world. Enterprise network usage and requirements are dramatically different today compared to just one year ago. How exactly has the global health crisis impacted the modern WAN? What are the challenges? Let us explore these questions and examine the best practices network managers and engineers should consider when looking to adapt to a post-COVID world.
According to a recent EMA report, the pandemic has wide-ranging effects on the state of the enterprise WAN. Here are several key findings:
- The remote workforce has more than quadrupled. Over 90% of enterprises have seen an increase in the number of employees working from home. Nearly 65% of enterprise employees are regularly working from home today, compared to just 14% prior to the pandemic. This shift to remote work has transformed network management and security needs in many ways. Gaining end-to-end network visibility, understanding bandwidth usage trends and managing security policies effectively are just a few critical priorities that have become more urgent in a post-COVID world. With better network visibility and management capabilities, administrators can prevent, identify and mitigate network, application and security issues more effectively.
- The work-from-home paradigm seems here to stay. Half of enterprises believe that their recent shift to remote work will be permanent, while 23% expect the number of users working from home to remain significantly higher than it was pre-COVID. Most large enterprises and their employees have adjusted to the fact that remote work is here to stay. Companies have been making changes to host essential network services in the cloud and make critical services available to all employees regardless of their location. We’ll eventually see most companies move primarily to these cloud-hosted services by default to support the long-term requirements of sustaining a distributed, remote workforce.
- Voice and video usage has become ubiquitous. Almost 95% of enterprises have observed increased real-time application traffic on their WANs during the pandemic, as many workers have turned to voice, video, and online meetings to compensate for the lack of traditional face time. The first few months of the pandemic, many network managers were inundated with user issues from online hosted meetings, dropped audio calls, choppy or poor video quality, etc. Voice- and video-first operations have brought about new usage patterns and required administrators to maintain higher service levels for both applications hosted on-premises or in the cloud. Given how heavily we rely on these applications and services today, monitoring and anticipating bandwidth usage requirements has become a top priority for network teams.
- COVID-era networks require a different approach. Half of all enterprise IT teams are responsible for both WAN operations and managing remote workforce experiences. As such, network management teams are adjusting their network architectures and network operations tools to address the realities of today’s post-pandemic WAN. The top metrics for tracking user experiences are changing as well. Application health and performance and ISP availability and performance are most commonly cited as key insights for a large majority of organizations, while VPN insights, home Wi-Fi performance, and client device state are all secondary priorities. With the recent changes in network design and operations, remote VPN usage, VPN insights and user usage data have become even more critical aspects of maintaining network visibility. The highest priority for managing user experience has shifted to how ISPs are able to manage application health and provide better application performance from end to end. Primary and backup links are now common network design considerations. Organizations are prioritizing stable or high-performance WAN paths for high-priority applications and a backup link in case of failures as part of the “new normal” for network architecture.
- WAN monitoring requirements are also changing.While traditional network traffic and infrastructure insights are still critical to network operations success, most enterprises rank remote desktop access tools and internet and endpoint monitoring solutions as most important. With the growth in remote work, network managers now need to understand the enterprise-level bandwidth usage, VPN insights, user activity accessing enterprise VPN, top talkers, and more. Network administrators need performance management capabilities that enable granular visibility into VPN technologies, firewall services and cloud-hosted applications, as well as more sophisticated reporting and service monitoring.
- Organizations are accelerating SD-WAN initiatives. Despite today’s evolving IT requirements, budget cutbacks and general state of uncertainty in the market, only 3% of enterprises have canceled an SD-WAN project since the pandemic began. Most enterprises (60%) have accelerated their SD-WAN plans during the pandemic, with 59% even expanding the scope of their SD-WAN plans by adding more sites. Not all network traffic is created equal; with the help of a centralized controller and the ability to securely and intelligently direct traffic across the WAN, SD-WAN has remained highly popular among enterprises. This trend should continue, as it can elevate application performance levels and increase the quality of user experiences, resulting in increased business productivity and reduced operations cost for IT.
End-to-end visibility for COVID-era WANOps
In the past, organizations designed network architectures to support specific enterprise applications, and in turn, business operations functioned accordingly. Recent changes in business scenarios, such as the overnight migration to remote work, the resulting changes in user requirements and network security, and more, have changed this dynamic. Today, businesses must adapt and redesign their networks to network and leverage new technologies and capabilities to meet these new requirements.
Business continuity in a post-COVID world demands improved network security, unshakeable application performance, reliable multi-WAN operations and more. Networks need to be able to leverage broadband internet connectivity for remote users, maintain capacity availability and implement robust security protections across the enterprise. These adjustments go beyond making changes at the hardware level to improve performance. They require improved network design, proper integrations, ongoing optimization and more, which all depend on end-to-end network visibility.
The enterprise WAN has evolved significantly as cloud, hybridization and SD-WAN adoption rates have risen over the past several years. In turn, so too have approaches to network operations and WANOps. Today’s WAN architecture and management strategies will need to accelerate that evolution to keep pace with the pandemic's disruptive business consequences.
If your network isn’t ready to meet the changing business and user needs that COVID has triggered, now is the time to establish the end-to-end visibility your team needs to succeed.
