Companies Want To Formalize The WFH Network Architecture
According to a survey released by the Enterprise Management
Association (EMA) in July, despite concerns about budget constraints and
infrastructure complexity, the corporate network team is taking steps to
formalize the WFH network architecture.
Companies are transforming their networks to better support
employees working from home (WFH).
According to a survey released by the Enterprise Management Association (EMA) in July, despite concerns about budget constraints and infrastructure complexity, the corporate network team is taking steps to formalize the WFH network architecture. In a survey of 312 IT professionals in North America and Europe, 90.7% of the respondents said they wanted to provide a home office user experience comparable to on-site work.
The popular practice adopted by these teams is to deploy a
device (called a branch) for each remote worker to provide various network and
security functions, such as access points and security gateways. Respondents
indicated that they will prioritize the network security hardware of the WFH
network, followed by Wi-Fi, routing, and software-defined wide area network
(SD-WAN). Many companies also support employee reimbursement for Internet and
wireless wide area network upgrades, such as LTE, 4G, and 5G, to support
primary or backup connections.
Although the upfront cost of these network upgrades may
discourage some companies, poor employee performance and decreased customer
satisfaction may pose more long-term threats to companies.
Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at EMA,
said: “Many companies are trying to figure out who needs, who doesn’t, and what
their budgets are.” He added that upgrades may be expensive at first, but many
companies are also adopting changes in real estate and Office leasing to save
money and further supplement the cost of network upgrades.
Layered method supported by WFH
McGillicuddy said that most companies do not plan to deploy
network hardware in each employee's home office. Instead, the network team is
determining which user groups need a better experience and more comprehensive
support, such as call center agents, engineers, R&D, and top management.
He said: "Anyone facing customers needs reliable
performance and better security-for privacy considerations. People who use
sensitive data at home need to be protected."
For these employees, the network team customizes the
installation package according to their roles and job functions. They may send
small SD-WAN gateways to some employees for reliable WFH connections, and provide
other people with fees to install fixed mobile connections.
But 42% of the companies surveyed said they take an
undifferentiated approach in supporting remote workers. In these cases, the
network team will define a set of requirements, such as deploying network
hardware to a home office or upgrading to a software-defined periphery, and let
all employees implement the requirements, regardless of their position.
Online spending has picked up
McGillicuddy said that although companies have stopped IT
and network spending due to the repeated epidemic, they are now increasing
their planned spending for 2023. Among these planned investments, the notable
part is LAN and Wi-Fi infrastructure. He said that BYOD plans have grown and
companies need to support these devices with higher bandwidth, compliance and
security.
Other budget priorities are NetOps and monitoring tools.
Before the WFH surge, companies focused their monitoring on a certain number of
devices on their company's site. Now they collect data from multiple home
offices, all of which generate different types of telemetry data. McGillicuddy
said that although remote desktop access is a key part of the troubleshooting
toolset, it is difficult to scale horizontally for multiple employees.
In order to fully process this data, 95.5% of IT
organizations said they are allocating budgets to enhance WFH's NetOps tools.
He said that tools such as endpoint monitoring (traditionally not part of the
network toolset) are now needed to identify user experience problems.
Therefore, collaboration between the NetOps and SecOps teams is growing because
they recognize the need to share tools and insights. At the same time, the team
is extending their traditional network infrastructure monitoring to home
offices with hardware deployments.
What about SASE?
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a new thing in the
network industry, and people began to pay attention to it during the epidemic.
According to McGillicuddy, 81% of companies said they accelerated SASE
deployment within a few months of the lockdown to meet WFH's needs.
He said that in many cases, WFH has blurred the line between
SD-WAN and SASE, because many network and security vendors have turned to
provide platforms with zero-trust network access, SD-WAN and cloud delivery security.
McGillicuddy pointed out: "Many SD-WAN vendors that have worked with them have accelerated their SASE roadmaps or have identified specific use cases, such as the expanded wave of work from home, which means they no longer focus on connecting sites, and More focused on connecting people."