2021 Global Networking Trends Report: business resiliency takes center stage

Riyadh, KSA, 30 December 2020: Businesses worldwide experienced unprecedented long-term disruption to their operations almost overnight due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In response, Cisco has conducted an extensive study of the issues surrounding business resiliency during the last 12 months. The report highlights the key enterprise network trends companies should consider ensuring they are well-positioned to navigate 2021 successfully. 

The 2021 Global Networking Trends Report: Business Resilience Special Edition identifies resiliency as the ability of a business to do more than provide an acceptable level of service in a challenging period.  Instead, it is to have an intuitive network platform that can respond quickly to any circumstances, enable new operating models and digital services, integrate with IT processes, and safeguard their employees, core activities, customers, and brand. 

The report highlights a Business Continuity Institute (BCI) survey that found 59.8% of business continuance professionals rate IT resilience as the most significant factor in responding to the current pandemic. It explores how a company can develop its network strategy so that it can complement a business’s resilience strategy.

The 2021 Global Networking Trends Report: Business Resilience Special Edition highlights five key networking trends and the need to employ multi-dimensional approaches across the workforce, workplace, workloads, and IT operations.  

1. Secure remote access: Studies have found that an average of 4.7 times more people is now working from home than pre-pandemic levels. As such, companies should empower their staff to be productive and collaborative from anywhere by improving security on work-from-home networks by scaling VPN, use multifactor authentication MFA to protect applications, and deploy cloud security and secure access services edge (SASE) to defend against cyber threats.
2. Smart-trusted workplaces: Networking teams prepare for a safe return to the office by improving existing video conferencing and location-based Wi-Fi services. Others are deploying new services and safeguards, such as physical distance monitoring, proximity reporting, increased workplace automation, and more. IT departments must ensure that networks are stress tested, automate identity-based secure access, and enhance customers’ safety location-based analytics once people return to offices.
3. Multicloud networking: Increasingly, IT leaders are now using cloud solutions to improve business resilience in the wake of the global pandemic. As a result, adopting a multi-cloud model — distributing applications, workloads, and data across on-premises data centers and public cloud providers — has sped up, reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and protecting against and spreading the risk of catastrophic failures.
4. Network automation: The pandemic’s impact has also been felt in the unprecedented levels of steep fluctuations in client counts, application traffic patterns, and rapid increases in new use cases for e-learning, video conferencing, virtual events, remote care, process automation, and other network-dependent services. To ensure continued service, it is essential that repetitive administrative tasks, network access, onboarding, and segmentation, and policy beyond the data center to the cloud are automated and many other networks functions.
5. AI-enabled assurance:  The sheer complexity of modern networks and the deluge of events and issues bombarding multiple disparate monitoring platforms can be overwhelming and ineffective, especially when disruptions hit. A Cisco study found an average of 4,400 wireless-related monthly events on an enterprise network. By implementing AI-enabled network analytics and machine learning techniques, NetOps teams can achieve a much more manageable set of issues they can take action on.

“Although the challenges businesses have faced in 2020, due to the huge disruption to networks created by the Covid-19 pandemic, solutions are available. Businesses that rethink their network strategy to focus on resiliency by adopting the latest network capabilities will be agile enough to stay ahead of the next big challenge. They can do this by implementing greater automation and AI-powered insights to empower companies and adapt to an ever-changing environment while maintaining high levels of service. By becoming aware of the key networking trends for 2021 such as the workforce, workplace, workloads and within operations, the business will be able to employ strategies that will allow them to be flexible enough to meet potential future disruptions with greater confidence and success,” said Osama Al-Zoubi, Cisco CTO for the Middle East and Africa.