Coming off a year plagued with uncertainty, frenzy, and the need to adapt and keep businesses moving forward in a virtual environment, we enter 2021 with new priorities for network operations. Distributed work has created a host of new opportunities that will need to be addressed as new practices mature, while early innovation to deal with this new reality will begin to thrive.
A greater importance will be placed on network capabilities within organizations as they undergo rapid digital transformation efforts. Network teams need to be proactive to be effective - especially as organizations explore a permanent hybrid or remote workforce model. After seeing organizations adjust the way they work over the past year, here is what I expect to see as 2021 progresses.
#1: The Widespread Adoption of Multi-Cloud Networking
Chris Wade
Co-Founder &
CTO,
Itential
Organizations faced unique circumstances in 2020, and many times solutions were put in place to keep the lights on. For example, business units started to optimize technology choices for their teams while creating an integration challenge for the organization as a whole. This meant many teams found themselves utilizing different cloud-based services due to the shift to remote work. While organizations adapted to such a model, this introduced a new problem of distributed applications and data across multiple cloud and SaaS networks. Left unmanaged, organizations will find themselves operating in siloed networks that are inefficient and unsecure. Through multi-cloud networking, teams can integrate and improve long term performance by reducing complexity. As teams have time to adjust to a distributed application environment, the next push will be in optimizing work across these numerous domains.
#2: Rise of the Edge
The rise of edge computing will be fast in 2021 as workload location becomes a priority for large enterprises. Computing has ebbed and flowed through highly centralized to distributed workloads over the decades. Now that processing has swung back to the central location of the public cloud, organizations are looking for a way to decrease latency for newly developed applications, focused on new innovation made possible through edge computing. Even in its early phases of development, the edge is already seeing aggressive competition in order for networks to provide content and application delivery providers with near real-time capabilities. In order to deliver these services, larger organizations will look to partner with network and cloud providers that deliver locations that can offer compute close to the end user. By 2022, we will see huge strides in edge development, but will be faced with novel issues as these networks are up and running.
#3: Network Importance in Digital Transformation
The onset of the pandemic accelerated the inevitable move toward digital transformation, pushing organizations further along this journey than they anticipated, some even five to six years ahead of schedule. Subsequently, CIOs and CTOs are now realizing that their networks are becoming the foundation for their digital transformation. In 2021, they will need to understand the issues this will cause and how it affects the entire enterprise. Applications are distributed more than ever, and without an effective network, these applications will not meet their expected performance and resiliency. In 2021, network operations are moving from a lagging priority to a leading priority, supporting both multi-cloud networking and edge computing. Ultimately, network automation will be synonymous with network operations. The complexity of the task will focus our efforts on building the machines that operate the network, reducing toil so that IT and cloud teams can focus on accelerating their organization’s digital transformation efforts.
The volatility and rapid change in 2020 forced executives to reevaluate their efforts behind digital transformation. As a result, there was a greater appreciation for their network and the reliance on its operational success. While organizations will continue to face issues associated with remote work, including cloud migration and the need for edge computing, this will mean a greater push for successful network automation which will only support further organizational alignment.
