Due to the new global economic situation, companies, employees and anyone who wants to fill the afternoon place completely unexpected demands on networks. Looking at a wealth of WAN usage statistics shared by hundreds of organizations around the world, here are five predictions for how businesses will change the way they work based on shifts in business traffic.
Cloud adoption will increase
Public cloud adoption was already developing around the world. While the previous motivation was cost, convenience, and simplicity, the new direction for cloud adoption will be driven by the ease of managing change. This, in turn, will put more emphasis on data privacy, security, and local regulatory and compliance requirements. A global survey of more than 1,000 companies found that the adoption of SaaS applications increased from 23% in 2019 to more than 51% in 2020, and the average number of SaaS applications also increased.
Hybrid workplaces will rise, while networks need to be optimized for video conferencing
The current environment has shown that tech workers and businesses must have the flexibility to work from anywhere and be just as productive. Collaboration is essential. Video conferencing applications will become the norm. In this environment, the Wide Area Network (WAN) will be of strategic importance and as such must be optimized to meet the needs of voice, video and other similar applications to enable hybrid workplaces. WAN collaboration applications are at the top of the SaaS heap and are expected to grow rapidly in a post-Covid-19 world. More than 38% of those interviewed in the aforementioned report indicated that complexity was the main obstacle to WAN performance. This will have to be resolved.
Industries will need to evolve and automation will increase
It is clear that certain industries will be more severely affected than others. In many cases, foot traffic causes network traffic. Retail, hotels, transportation, sports – all of these industries had an impact on foot traffic and this also had an impact on network traffic. On the other hand, e-commerce traffic has increased and last-mile delivery has increased. All of these factors will lead to increased adoption of automation, especially in manufacturing and agricultural industries, for example. Robotics, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence technologies will form the core of the next generation of industries that will reduce some form of human dependency.
Corporate sites can become a unit of
This means we may see more workers telecommuting while we wait for all the normal installations. This can lead to a reduction in campus sites, as companies assess workers who need to be on site, versus the "floating" worker population. Therefore, some contraction in commercial real estate will be inevitable, at least in the context of the current cyclical change, although population growth and worker density in a given geography are likely to offset this reduction. Technology and software companies are more likely to benefit from this trend, while other traditional companies will need to develop their physical properties, including offices, cafeteria, break rooms, conference rooms, etc. Legal teams will also need to assess the risk of physical compromise, even for part-time visitors. This will affect the way work gets done, at least for the foreseeable future. It is conceivable that companies permanently designate certain workers in their organization as remote workers, even if they live in the same vicinity as the office, but have less of a need to go inside. Physical security and protection of the workplace must be emphasized again. In what is truly a sign of the times, Germany plans to make telecommuting a right, while many tech giants are toying with the idea of a more permanent transition to telecommuting.
Managed network services to speed up even more
Reducing on-site staff and emphasizing rapid change management will likely result in further acceleration of managed services. The concept of network as a service is already widespread. Managed WANs and SD-WANs will be the preferred option as providers will be responsible for delivery and will be able to provide the same or higher service levels as a company deploying a DIY network. It will be an attractive proposition for even larger companies that employ an army of staff to maintain their networks and IT, and the pendulum swings a bit more towards managed services. In the context of Software-Defined WANs (SD-WANs), this trend is clearly visible, as the analyzed survey revealed that the preference for a managed SD-WAN increased from 59% to over 87% between 2019 and 2020. Nothing is eternal and the current situation is no different. What will last longer is that companies will realize that a good disaster recovery strategy must include planning for unforeseen contingencies without compromising productivity, data security, or the peer-to-peer collaboration tools that are essential to maintaining the "status quo". The modern network will have to be structured to allow for any eventuality. Shashi Kiran is Director of Marketing and Product at Aryaka Networks