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Networking in the Time of COVID-19 Jesper Andersen, President and CEO of Infoblox discusses how the nearly complete decentralization of enterprise networks poses a real threat to business continuity and data security I’m writing this from home. “So what,” you may be thinking, “I’m reading this at home.” But as companies around the world have sent employees home to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are living through a global experiment to find out what happens when millions of people transition to working remotely overnight. The ability of companies to become “virtual offices” almost immediately is due in large part to the dramatic transformations that have taken place in the technology sector over the past decade. Driven by the development of computing- and storage-asa-service models, these innovations have shifted enterprise technology out of on-premise hardware and onto cloud-based platforms. In doing so, they have enabled workers to access data, run analytics, and collaborate with colleagues from anywhere in the world—including their homes. The COVID-19 pandemic is showing SMARTSMB / May 2020
us that this transformation remains incomplete. Recent questions about the resiliency of our networking infrastructure—including residential internet and corporate networks—demonstrate that networking is one of the few remaining bottlenecks in the true digital transformation of the modern workplace.
and protecting individual devices and overall network security have the potential to overwhelm IT professionals. Now, with work from home being the default across virtually the entire economy, the nearly complete decentralization of enterprise networks poses a real threat to business continuity and data security.
These limitations result in challenges to productivity and access for workers trying to log in from offsite locations and new devices, and open up networks to additional security risks. Inherent physical limits like latency and bandwidth hamper the speed and responsiveness of our networks. And the complexity of modern networking functions and our modern enterprise network ecosystem results in a patchwork of networking and security solutions provided by a multitude of vendors that are challenging to conduct in harmony.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The reality is that in today’s cloud-based environment, these limitations don’t need to exist. Like computing and storage has done in the past, networks can be managed as a service, allowing managers to spin up and down critical functions automatically and as needed for individual users and branch offices.
Modern networks have become so complex that, even in normal times, the tasks of maintaining uninterrupted service, troubleshooting problems
When it comes to latency, there are a number of opportunities to put cloudbased applications near users as cloud providers or independent co-location vendors have provided points of presence (POPs) around the world. And indeed, the world is increasingly becoming covered with high-band-
