The Expanded Network

With up to 92 Million more “locations” to support for remote workers – which is forecasted only to grow further, organizations are finding themselves in an interesting dilemma. Traditional approaches to networks and remote users (VPNs) aren’t equipped to adequately handle security, application performance, and the flexibility that organizations are now offering as a standard offer to employees.  Technology outside of networking has blossomed into a work-anywhere, at-any-time model, empowering business to find new talent outside of their traditional geographic radius in order to stay competitive and handle business disruptions.

In this article, we’ll look at the current state of networking, developing trends, and how it could continue to unfold into 2023 and beyond.

The Evolving Workscape

The 2022 American Opportunity Survey reflects major upheaval in the US workforce. 92 million workers were offered flexible work options, while 80 million actually engaged in flexible work of some kind. That’s nearly a quarter of the US population!²⁰ The Ladders Q1 2022 Remote Work Report found that 24% of all professional jobs in the US and Canada are hiring for permanently remote roles. Concurrently, EY Global discovered that nine in ten employees want flexibility in both where and when they work.

There have been other workforce accommodations cropping up as well. Worker’s report wanting no meeting days, 4 day work weeks, and work-from-anywhere provisions such as coworking spaces, coffee shops, working abroad, and other flexible arrangements. Over 50% want to have asynchronous-first work options.⁵

The World Economic Forum believes employers are moving to meet these demands due to productivity and retention concerns. 58% of Americans currently have opportunities to work from home at least 1 day a week.⁶ Also, there has been a 46% increase in offices planning to go remote, remote-first, or hybrid in the near future. 72% plan for this to be permanent.⁵

But many employers aren’t truly equipped from a networking perspective to support this shift – both from a security perspective and allowing workers to be efficient with application performance from anywhere. As a result, organizations are not only losing time and money, but they are also losing employees who find that their employers tech is not meeting their needs to perform their job. Almost half of US workers (49%) indicated they would leave their job if their experience with technology was not up to their expectations. Hybrid workers lose up to an hour each week troubleshooting their technology – in part due to not having a consistent experience when they work remote compared to working in the office.  Creating a holistic environment is an important goal for organizations of all sizes to aim for.

When Technology isn’t Working

With the inherent nature of remote work, technology performance has never been more important for organizations.  Digital/Remote employees are more invested than ever in the technology stack that their organization providers.  Performance requirements have never been higher.  With half of employees stating, if the technology hinders their job performance, they would consider leaving.  Nearly 40% of remote employees are wasting time due to tech issues. Not only is technology important for retaining talent, but it is become more critical that the right tools are in place to ensure a seamless experience and a quick resolution.  According to a survey completed by Office Depot, “only 1 in 5 employees felt that they would be supported by their IT department when troubleshooting technology issues." 

Office Depot further found that 96% of their respondents rely on technology to some degree in their job capacity.  Ensuring that the network in place is able to support these requirements, must, for all companies be a top priority.

In fact, a study released this year from PwC reports that one in five are likely to switch to a new employer in the next 12 months. A previous study indicated that 65% of employees surveyed were looking for a new job and 88% of executives were seeing higher turnover rates.⁴ Ensuring that an optimized technology experience has never been more important.

McKinsey & Company found flexible work arrangements are in the top three reasons why workers are seeking new employment. 45% of respondents told Indeed they switched jobs because their employers did not offer flexibility. Finally, in a global survey, 21% of respondents who quit their jobs in 2021 reported lack of flexible working hours or location as the reason.¹

SDWAN plays are critical role in enabling a flexible, secure, and high-performance experience more than ever.  Work loads have shifted, the labor force has spread out across a larger and more comprehensive geography, and cyber security has become more important than ever.

SASE & SSE – A Quest for Enhanced Cyber Security

“In 2019, Gartner introduced the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) and category. SASE defined the convergence of two distinct technology markets, the WAN edge (SD-WAN) and network security, into a global cloud service that enables secure and optimized access to any user, at any location, and to any application.  The security pillar of SASE included Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) with Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Zero Trust Network Access 9ZTNA), and Firewall as a service (FWaaS) delivered as a cloud service.

Two years later, Gartner introduced a new category called the Security service Edge (SSE) to describe a more limited scope of convergence focused on network security.  SSE converged three security components, SWG, CASB/DLP, and ZTNA into a single cloud service.  SSE provides secure access to applications without directly addressing the end-to-end optimized network connectivity and east-west WAN security aspects of that access.  These remain part of a separate technology stack including technologies such as SD-WAN, Next generation Firewalls (NGFWs), and global network backbones.” Cato SSE 360 Report – Total visibility and control for all traffic, users, and applications everywhere, 6/23/2022.

Technology leaders and organizations have known that the rise of multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, remote work, and a greater reliance on software as a service has been coming for years.  Software and traditional hardware manufacturers are migrating to as a service (or a recurring revenue model) for quite some time.  Some of these organizations are shifting entirely away from one time procurement/hardware based deployments. Applications are no longer centralizing in an organization’s data center – they are moving to disparate cloud environments, hosted all over the country/world.

These trends, being driven by organizations and suppliers, are some of the trend drivers for the emerging Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offerings.

Let’s talk about some of the key barriers to digital transformation as illustrated by a leader in the SASE/SSE space, Cato:

• Traditional/Legacy networks are designed around physical corporate locations
• This design pattern forces a re-architecture of the network to support internal applications in physical and cloud datacenters, public cloud applications, and secure access by users anytime and anywhere
• Centralized (backhauling) security model slows down secure cloud access
• As the Volume of Internet and Cloud-bound traffic increases, it no longer makes sense to drive all the traffic through datacenter firewalls.  Direct secure internet must be enabled at every location and down to a single remote user to extend full visibility and control to all applications without impact the user experience
• Legacy security solutions can’t scale to support work from anywhere
• Supporting the hybrid workforce requires a flexible and scalable security architecture that can secure the entire workforce wherever they work from: in the office, on the road, and at home
• Disjointed solutions introduce fragmented and complex management
• Security consolidation and architectural convergence in the cloud reduce the work required form IT to keep the security infrastructure up and running and in an optimal security posture.  As the work shift to expert team running the cloud platform for all customers, the likelihood of a mistake or oversight due to workload is reduced.

Source: Cato SSE 360 Report – Total visibility and control for all traffic, users, and applications everywhere, 6/23/2022.

How CDN Could Reshape SDWAN

An emerging trend that could help to reshape the technology we currently know as SDWAN is the traditional CDN (content delivery network)’s foray into the SDWAN product offering.  As we discussed earlier in this article, the ability for applications to perform at an extremely high level – anywhere, anytime – is more important than ever due to the distributed workforce and the trends over 2023 and beyond.

So, what value does a CDN offer? A content delivery network is a network of interconnected servers that speeds up webpage loading for data-heavy applications. With traditional CDN providers entering the SDWAN space and leveraging their networks, cloud applications can expect to see a huge boost in performance.

Players like Cloudflare have already started productizing their network and their SDWAN offer to produce these types of results.  Cloudflare, a leader in the CDN market, DDoS, Web application firewalls, has thrown their hat in the game. With an impressive network, within 50ms of 95% of internet users globally, the benefit could exponentially change the face of SDWAN.  Traditional SDWAN providers have sought to accomplish this with traditional MPLS backbones, POPs, but nowhere to the breadth that Cloudflare is able to offer.

We believe an emerging trend into 2023 is the further growth of the traditional CDN network into the SDWAN space – either by mergers/acquisitions, proprietary software, or partnerships.

How Traditional LAN is Impacting SDWAN – SDLAN?

One of the objectives for many IT departments is to focus on creating less physical hardware to maintain, support, learn, and deploy in their environment.  With the increasing complexity of solutions and the overwhelming number of choices that are available to IT departments, it can be a daunting task to keep abreast of all the changes, updates, patches, and security components of every piece of gear in their environment.  Increasingly, IT departments are choosing to consolidate their IT infrastructure where they can.  One area that’s seeing some new developments is in the intersection of SDWAN and the LAN.  A new acronym, SD-LAN is an offshoot of this need and wish for centralization of IT functions, specifically at branch locations or in a work from anywhere workforce (albeit to a lesser degree). (Reference for SD-LAN: https://www.extremenetworks.com/extreme-networks-blog/sd-lan-vs-lan-what-are-the-key-differences/)

This may be a new trend in 2023 and onward, where more and more providers start bringing traditional LAN technology into their stack for SDWAN.  It brings an aggregated approach to LAN and WAN management.  In addition, it helps tie these two inter-related components together in a more seamless fashion – as they both directly impact each other. Application performance can be optimized together from a LAN and WAN perspective and can give a better cradle to grave performance of applications across the physical infrastructure of the LAN and as applications route to cloud destinations. Organizations will be able to centralize on a technology stack – rather than having to support a different WAP (wireless access point), PoE switches (Power over Ethernet), and other LAN hardware components.  This will start to allow for both an easier hiring process (limited number of technical expertise), but also for maintaining the security of the environment.

SD-LAN bridges the gap between disparate systems – often allowing for better context-based security policies by users, devices, applications, locations – plus the standard SDWAN features.  This helps to create a unified layer of wireless and wired infrastructure with an organizations environment with org wide policies and reporting. Another interesting aspect is the rise of IoT in environments, SD-LAN offers some intriguing promises to secure the devices in a more holistic fashion.

Security’s Impact on SDWAN 3.0

Back to cyber security – one of the most talked about topics, globally – when it comes to technology.  Ransomware has increased by nearly 13% from 2021 into 2022 – a rise nearly as big as the last five years combined. Error (misconfigurations being a primary driver) is responsible for 13% of all data breaches.   82% of breaches involved a human element.  There’s no question that cyber security attacks are increasing – and rapidly at that.

As a result, cyber security must be at the core of all technology moving forward.  It cannot be a conversation that is an add-on for anyone.  As a result, as we discussed earlier, the emergence of SASE and SSE.

Managed service offerings in SDWAN offer clients the benefit of having a second set of eyes (in a co-managed or fully managed environment). SSE and SASEE with the CASB and DLP help enable full visibility and control of critical and sensitive data. The ability to control policies on a granular level with any device, anywhere – significantly boosts an organizations security posture.

Yet, as we talked about before, there’s more to security than just SSE and SASE.  With Cloudflare, there are some interesting intersections of DDoS protection and further security offerings.  This is another area for 2023 and beyond where there may be some consolidation – with SDWAN providers or Cyber Security providers acquiring/merging with each other to provide even further holistic coverage in the Cyber Security space.  At this time, SDWAN has a spectacular roadmap for becoming a centralized point of security for organizations of all sizes in the future, reducing complexity and level of effort to maintain for organizations.

Network-as-a-Service – A New Vector

Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is a nascent technology that delivers wide area networking from a cloud provider in the form of a client subscription service.  The NaaS model allows users to connect to cloud services through a virtual network that’s managed and secured by the NaaS vendor.  That vendor provider owns, operates, installs and maintains all physical network equipment and the customer pays a monthly fee for those networking services. In a managed service NaaS model, the provider offers network hardware as a subscription along with an additional subscription service to operate the network for the customer.  Depending on the NaaS provider, there is often support for whitebox customer premise equipment or even virtualized CPE to terminate service at the office location.

NaaS offers potential advantages to enterprise customers, starting with greater flexibility. Changes to the network – like the addition of a branch location, cloud provider connection, or extranet – happen via software, and are typically provided through a self-service model.

In addition, NaaS provides financial flexibility by offering more options than traditional upfront capital investments in network infrastructure. Many NaaS services let enterprises pay with term-based subscriptions and usage-based billing to support a fluctuating range of consumption by the business.

As with any new technology, we are starting to see a variety of approaches with some proprietary technologies applied on the forefront of the NaaS market.  Soon NaaS providers will offer tools and capabilities for automating various aspects of network management, including tools for automating network provisioning, configuration and monitoring.  This leads well into the next topic that will influence networking – the application of AI and ML.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) – SDWAN 3.0

Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning have been some of the biggest buzz words in technology for the last few years.  With ChatGPT bringing more awareness of just how far AI/ML has come within the last few years.  SDWAN is another technology that will need to adapt to the rapidly changing pace of technology innovation in order to remain relevant.  Feature sets or tools need to be constantly developed and deployed automatically, in order to support business operations and cyber security concerns. AI/ML offers an incredible opportunity to optimize end user experience – by handling tasks faster and more efficiently than a human. AI and ML offer an augmentation to an organization’s security and networking teams by assisting with routine processes and maintenance of the environment, adapting to the needs of the organization.

In addition, human error is one of the leading causes of cyber security breaches – AI/ML offers a unique opportunity to help better secure an environment for organizations.  It can function as an augmentation to the IT Staff, identifying potential problems before a cybercriminal uncovers the vulnerability.  AI and ML also offer unique insights into optimizing the network architecture and performance by aggregating data that it collects from the historical performance of the network – creating a self-healing, self-driving environment – that IT teams can monitor, review, and adjust with minimal effort. (Reference: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-i-machine-learning-in-sd-wan)

ChoiceTel’s prediction of 2023 and beyond is the adoption of more ML and AI capabilities of SDWAN, further driving down the reduction of human error, better utilization of human capital, and optimizing business operations.

5G and the Underlay – SDWAN 3.0

Another buzz word from the last few years, but one that will play a critical role for organization’s network in the years to come, is 5G. As 5G has emerged as a possible access type / underlay (the internet or access – whether private or public at a location), SDWAN technology will inevitably need to redesign itself to optimize the 5G experience for organizations. The cost to maintain physical fiber, coax, and copper infrastructure will help force more 5G coverage and business use throughout the foreseeable future. Already organizations are leveraging it as a primary and/or a secondary circuit at business critical locations where internet diversity is an issue.

An interesting organization in this space is Ericsson – the owner of Cradlepoint and Vonage.  Cradlepoint has been a long-time front runner in the wireless space, and Vonage has been a leader in cloud phone systems and offers a VMware/VeloCloud option of SDWAN. The beginnings of the intersection of 5G and SDWAN are in their infancy at this point, but ChoiceTel expects the reliance of SDWAN on 5G to increase exponentially in the years to come.

Finding Expert Guidance 

Supporting remote work, cyber security processes/technology, and optimizing business operations has become the top requirement for IT departments.  In an ever evolving world of technology, business requirements, and a tight labor market, finding trusted consulting resources has become more important than ever.  Expert guidance can bridge personnel gaps, educate team members, and help drive innovation by bringing market knowledge to IT teams.  ChoiceTel has nearly 30 years of experience in producing results, curating technology vendors, and moving the needle for organizations from midmarket to large enterprise.

Considerations for a Next-gen Network

While not an exhaustive list, here are some ideas to consider:

1. Where are my organization’s workloads now – and where will they be in the future: It’s important to create a transition strategy.  Many organizations will need to adopt solutions that will assist them in their business transformation – supporting legacy applications and cloud based applications. It’s important a provider can grow with an organization – reducing the amount of change that is required (i.e. switching to a new vendor due to not having the feature sets needed).
2. What will my organization’s workforce look like now – and in the future:  How will my organization’s workforce shift in the coming years – does my organization have the proper network architecture and security components to adequately manage a distributed workforce.  The world is becoming increasingly global in the business realm – do my solutions adhere to GDPR or other foreign policies?
3. Use of Human Capital: There’s only so much time in a day – where does my organizations IT team need to focus – and what can we offload?
4. IoT: Is my organization planning on deploying IoT – and do we have the appropriate security mechanisms in place to support IoT devices and optimize network performance for them?
5. Critical Applications: What critical applications do you have in your environment that could affect employee productivity and job satisfaction if they aren’t working optimally?
6. Cyber Security: How are you currently managing various elements of your cyber security landscape? To what level has your organization centralized on tech stacks? What is the level of effort to maintain your cyber security environment?
7. Underlays: How are my underlays supporting my digital transformation, what will they look like in the coming years? Will 5G become a primary source of access?

The Future and the Possibilities of Technologies on Networking

Up and coming workplace technologies and practices are going to support the evolution of SDWAN and the burden the network must carry. Aside from the transformations we’ve already discussed, in the near future you may be hearing more about:

• 3D printing at locations – housing, machines, larger scale projects
• 3D and integrated hybrid meeting spaces that better blend in-person, audio, video, and AR/VR participants.
• Using robots to represent remote individuals in the workplace.
• The Metaverse infiltrating into the workspace, along with AR and VR workplace tools.
• AI/ML at the edge
• Increasing human to AI interactions, along with reliance on AI technology and AI Assistants to automate processes and streamline workflows.
• Spatial environments for remote engineering
• Advancements toward hologram technology.
• Increased reliance on portable computation devices.
• IoT – internet of things for more and more within an organization
• More advanced cyber security threats
• SaaS further growth
• Data driven environments – computing or collecting large amounts of data

A New Era of Networking is Beginning

Technology is always changing and adapting to business needs – the network is no exception.  With the rising adoption of bleeding edge technologies that are migrating into the adoption curve, the workloads, burdens, and expectations of the network are rising accordingly.

SDWAN Providers will need to adopt to new ways of solutioning to adequately address the needs of organizations as their IT environment morphs and changes to support the business needs and goals. This will help further centralization of technology and a more holistic view of the technology stack – both for organizations and suppliers.

Sources: 

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