To say the past eighteen months or so had been difficult for businesses would be downplaying it. We’re currently emerging from once-in-a-generation levels of turbulence and disruption, and those businesses that have managed to weather the storm are working hard to make themselves more digitally resilient, both at home and in the office.
According to a 2021 survey, more than two-thirds (66%) of business leaders are already redesigning or downsizing their physical office space to better accommodate remote working, and 7 in 10 employees say they want flexible working to stay permanently. Hybrid working is going nowhere, and businesses around the world are beginning to turn their attention to connectivity solutions such as SD-WAN and SASE to optimise and secure their cloud experience.
SD-WAN, which helps businesses optimise their network traffic, has experienced a small boom in the wake of the pandemic, with some forecasting a compound annual growth rate of nearly 35% for the sector over the next four years. The so-called new normal, however that looks, is highly likely to involve a significant amount of remote working, and SD-WAN technology can help employers maximise the QoE (quality of experience) for staff no matter where they are in the world, but only if the solution is managed correctly.
SASE builds even further on SD-WAN, delivering cloud-based access with a security overlay, allowing distributed teams to access company applications and resources with the same level of accessibility and security as if they were working in a central office. As remote working catches on as a more permanent way of working, SASE is really picking up pace. According to Gartner, by 2025 at least 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption encompassing user, branch and edge access, up from 10% in 2020.
So, with SASE and SD-WAN firmly part of the new digital transformation roadmap, what can businesses do to ensure fast and reliable internet no matter where their employees are or what tools they’re using? VPNs, virtual desktops, SD-WAN and SASE are all good and well, but how can businesses be sure the employee experience is the best it can possibly be when they’re not physically in the office? Here are 5 ways to help your business optimise and troubleshoot your staff’s connectivity.
Ensure the right methods for connecting to the internet are in place
This is just as much a question of security as anything else. If your business has employees scattered around the world in different geographical locations with different infrastructures, it’s important to have a firm understanding of how they access the internet. Fixed-line broadband might be the norm, but there will also be countless users around the world depending on mobile broadband or BYOA (Bring Your Own Access) solutions.
Understand the internet’s limitations
This ties in with the above point. Various internet access options come with different pros and cons. Understanding the limitations of those access points and being able to deploy solutions to remove or mitigate them will keep your employees productive, and ultimately provide them with a great user experience. An effective SD-WAN solution will be able to prioritise bandwidth for certain devices and ensure excellent QoS (Quality of Service) for all business applications.
Implement appropriate cloud acceleration
Simply connecting to the network isn’t enough for competitive businesses who want to maintain high levels of productivity and optimise their employees’ experience. By leveraging optimized internet connectivity solutions to scan, analyse, decode and re-route to optimise BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), your business can ensure that it’s squeezing every last drop of value out of its network infrastructure towards cloud destinations.
Ensure that you have a virtual connectivity dashboard
Acceleration and optimisation cannot work if your business has no way of monitoring or assessing its network. Employing a dashboard tool that allows you to instantly check up on performance metrics such as latency, application usage and packet loss will help you identify any potential issues before they become problems. This kind of 360-degree oversight became extremely popular among businesses that had distributed teams even before the pandemic. Then it was a luxury, but today it could easily be regarded as a necessity.
Ensure security features are built into your network infrastructure
Simply protecting the data centre is no longer enough. By embracing SASE or SD-WAN, your employees are more than likely going to be distributed between home and the office in various locations around the world. With secure web gateways in place, users can gain highly secure, direct access to applications hosted in the cloud, without even needing to route traffic through a data centre. This allows businesses to effectively take a ring-fenced approach to connectivity, funnelling potentially sensitive data from A to B without any unnecessary stops along the way.
Regardless of which path a business takes to the cloud and hybrid working, the one thing connecting all routes is the need for reliable networking, efficient deployment, and real-time monitoring. While SD-WAN has been around for some time, the concept of SASE is still relatively new on the block, so businesses ought to be mindful when going from vendor to vendor seeking the right partnership to build a transparent, optimised and secure global network.
