Worldwide spending on cloud infrastructure has been on a sharp annual increase for the past decade. Investment in storage, hardware, virtualization and other cloud-enabling resources is expected to hit $74 billion by the end of 2021, and reach at least $110 billion by 2024. It’s perhaps the clearest metric yet that cloud computing is not only here to stay but will soon become one of the most viable ways to run a successful organization. If your business doesn’t utilize cloud technology, it may as well not exist as far as the competition is concerned. If the necessity of the cloud was ever in doubt, the pandemic laid those doubts to rest.
They say necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s certainly true looking back over the past two years. Businesses that were already flirting with cloud computing, exploring technologies like SD-WAN and SASE to optimize the remote working experience, have suddenly found themselves on a fast track to wholesale cloud adoption. According to McKinsey, a significant number of businesses are suffering a kind of “technology whiplash” after fitting a decade’s worth of digital transformation into the space of just three months. That kind of rapid innovation is necessary if you want to keep employees connected from their kitchen tables without skipping a beat, and it doesn’t look like that innovation is going to slow down any time soon.
We’re now two years into the pandemic and while there’s certainly light at the end of the tunnel, the immediate future remains shrouded in mystery. In the UK, for instance, where vaccine rollouts have been a relative success, new work-from-home orders have just been announced as we see out the year, spurring IT teams around the country back into action as they once again facilitate remote working. Is it any wonder that more than a third of businesses have increased their spend on cloud technology since the beginning of the pandemic?
As we alluded to in the first paragraph, cloud adoption has been growing pretty consistently since around 2012. Businesses around the world were already seeing the benefits of cloud technology; the pandemic merely acted as a catalyst for those that were on the fence. One of the technologies underpinning this rapid shift to the cloud appears to be the use of an internet underlay to facilitate “business as usual” in a hybrid working world.
Traditional MPLS and WANs that are centralized in big data centers are all well and good when everybody is office-based and sharing the same access points, but their benefits are immediately lost the minute someone decides to log on from home. With a large amount (42%) of staff keen to carry on working from home, and business leaders downsizing their offices to accommodate hybrid working, the challenge is beginning to crystalize. Businesses need a way to offer the same levels of service, security, speed and capacity via the public internet, as they do on their own office-based networks. That’s where SD-WAN, SASE and internet underlay technologies have come to age in a post-pandemic landscape.
Let’s reflect on the potential benefits of SD-WAN and SASE. If a business with more than 50 sites worldwide, each operating on multiple MPLS-based networks, is suddenly told that their staff must work from home, they have a problem. The online security environments at the different sites are likely to vary, making processes much harder to shift from one network to the other. Using a basic VPN solution to allow staff to log in from home can also lead to a massive knock in performance as traffic flows between data sources and applications becomes harder to track and define. In other words, the employee experience degrades the minute they switch to remote working, leading to increased frustration and lower productivity.
But what if that wasn’t the case? What if security could be standardized across all 50 sites, including employees' homes and other remote work locations? What if traffic flows and app usage could be monitored in real-time, allowing for a more streamlined allocation of resources, regardless of where a team member is logging on from? This is what SD-WAN and SASE deliver, and it’s likely to be the future of cloud.
Take the art of cloud acceleration, for instance. There was a time when packet loss was seen as a huge problem leading to performance loss, an obstacle to overcome. Cloud acceleration as part of an internet underlay, however, would view this packet loss as nothing more than useful information and turn it to an organization’s advantage. Those packet losses can be traced to their sources and remedied while traffic is re-routed - sometimes via less obvious paths - to maintain a seamless user experience.
This real-time optimization of the web experience is likely to be the next generational leap as we move forward into a hybrid working environment. The future might be uncertain, but at least it’ll be fast, secure and offer employees a consistent experience, whether they’re dialing in from their home broadband or sitting around the boardroom table.
