What are the most important things businesses should know about networking in 2023? First, businesses need to forget everything they've heard about networking from their vendors. The most accurate answer is that the network is and will be associated with applications and business, and these applications are now linked to the main way enterprises use the Internet and cloud, so enterprises are changing the way business value is distributed and delivered through the network , network technology will inevitably change.

　　1. Increasing reliance on the Internet

　　First, the Internet will get better because it will become more important. Every day, people do more things online and get more interactive, dynamic, interesting websites to visit and consume content, so the usability of the Internet has been quietly increasing.

　　It can be found that enterprises will continue to increase their dependence on the Internet. The Internet serves both as a channel for sales and customer support and, increasingly, as a way for employees to access core applications. During COVID, most businesses have turned to the internet to support working from home. IT managers in telecommuting businesses are finding that if they support employees' work over the Internet, they can bring traffic directly into the data center and bypass the VPN. As a result, the Internet begins to erode growth in VPN traffic, which will continue and accelerate in 2023.

　　2. Solve the pressure of Internet delay

　　The growth of Internet reliance has really driven the growth of cloud computing, as high-quality, interactive user interfaces have become critical. In this regard, cloud technology is much better and easier than changing data center applications. However, many cloud interactivity increases latency and further justifies the need to improve Internet latency.

　　Interactivity and latency sensitivity tend to have two effects. First, when moving interactive components to the cloud over the Internet, the enterprise will create a new network in the cloud parallel to the traditional MPLS VPN. Second, encourage cloud hosting to move closer to the edge to reduce application latency, which effectively reduces network latency.

　　3. Virtual networks abound

　　All the applications around the internet and the cloud make it harder to have any solid network strategy. In fact, in 2023, many users will start to choose "virtual network becomes network". In the cloud, branch offices, and data centers, connectivity will move from "physical networks" to virtual networks. A company's "network" will become the superposition of multiple, diverse physical networks. Applications will be connected to a virtual network, which will provide us with security and will try to ensure information access and content delivery.

　　Of course, it won't immediately replace MPLS VPNs, but it does require elevating connection management above MPLS VPNs; think virtual networks over MPLS. Since network connections are network services seen by users, this opens up the differentiation of network physical transmission elements, which is also a key step in transforming virtual network technology into a network-as-a-service (NaaS) framework.

　　In fact, NaaS is a technology that doesn't land in the user's yard and need to check it out itself, leaving the user free to assign it whatever functionality they like without fear of shock. In 2023, NaaS will gradually become firmly established and a number of NaaS models will emerge, some of which have changed little compared to current capabilities, while others have decisively merged network and cloud concepts. So expect to be somewhere in the continuum model before the end of this year, where we land will determine how well the network improves work and life beyond 2023.

　　4. Cloud Hosting Security Dominates

　　How about security? The combination of the Internet and the cloud has changed that too. Users cannot rely on fixed security appliances in the cloud, so more and more applications will use cloud-hosted instances of security tools.

　　Today, only about 7% of security is handled in a cloud-hosted manner, but by the end of 2023, this percentage will triple with the explosion of SASE, SSE, and other cloud-hosted security elements. Already, we can see a shift in security focus to the cloud, but also to the wider use of virtual networks that can connect agile cloud elements with an increasingly mobile workforce. Even SD-WAN, which was introduced as a way to use broadband internet to replace MPLS to create VPNs, is now at least as often used as a means of connectivity between and between cloud applications.

　　5. Existing suppliers have advantages

　　On the vendor side, enterprises are looking for alternative networking strategies, but they are still looking at the giants they can trust, preferably the ones they already use. Businesses in 2023 will be less resilient and therefore more reluctant to increase risk due to economic uncertainty.

　　In 2022, only 9% of businesses say their network provider's main competitors are those that are "innovative" for the future, down from a high of 15% in 2021 and 22% in 2019. Given that we are delivering more innovative networking technologies today than ever before, this number seems to indicate that the vendors are not really pushing a vision of the future worthy of technological advancement.

Original address: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3684176/looking-ahead-to-the-network-technologies-of-2023.html