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."