Coming off a year plagued with uncertainty, frenzy, and the need to adapt and keep businesses moving forward in a virtual environment, the year 2021 has developed a new set of priorities for network operations. With a distributed workforce and the new challenges it brings, a greater importance will be placed on network capabilities within organizations as they undergo rapid digital transformation efforts. After seeing organizations adjust the way they work over the past year, here is what I expect to see as 2021 continues to progress:
The Widespread Adoption of Multi-Cloud Networking
Organizations faced unique circumstances in 2020, and many times solutions were put in place to keep the lights on. Teams found themselves utilizing different cloud-based services due to the shift to remote work. While organizations adapted to such a model, this introduced a new problem of distributed applications and data across multiple cloud and SaaS networks. Left unmanaged, organizations will find themselves operating in siloed networks that are inefficient and unsecure. Through multi-cloud networking, teams can integrate and improve long term performance by reducing complexity.
Rise of the Edge
The rise of edge computing is coming up fast as workload location becomes a priority for large enterprises. Now that processing is largely taking place in a central location of the public cloud, organizations are looking for a way to decrease latency for newly developed applications, focused on new innovation made possible through edge computing. Even in its early phases of development, the edge is already seeing aggressive competition in order for networks to provide content and application delivery providers with near real-time capabilities. In order to deliver these services, larger organizations will look to partner with network and cloud providers that deliver locations that can offer computing close to the end user and by 2022, we will see huge strides in edge development.
Network Importance in Digital Transformation
As the pandemic accelerated the inevitable move toward digital transformation, CIOs and CTOs are now realizing that their networks are becoming the foundation for their digital transformation efforts. They will need to understand the issues this will cause and how it affects the entire enterprise. Applications are distributed more than ever, and without an effective network, these applications will not meet their expected performance and resiliency. This year, network operations will move from a lagging priority to a leading priority, supporting both multi-cloud networking and edge computing. Ultimately, network automation will be synonymous with network operations and this will reduce toil so that IT and cloud teams can focus on accelerating their organization’s digital transformation efforts.
The volatility and rapid change in 2020 forced executives to reevaluate their efforts behind digital transformation. As a result, there was a greater appreciation for their network and the reliance on its operational success.
Be sure to check out my full article in the Fast Mode and learn more about how Itential can address these growing network trends through the latest release of our low-code network automation platform, Itential 2020.2.
Chris Wade
Co-founder & CTO ‐ Itential
Chris co-founded Itential in 2014 to simplify and accelerate the adoption of network automation and to transform network operations practices. Using a model-based approach, Chris leads the innovation and development of the company’s flagship software portfolio of dynamic network automation applications.
