CIO OPINION pandemic exits . That admission portends profound changes for physical office spaces , corporate culture , connectivity and networking .
What many organisations thought would be temporary remote setups to ‘ flatten the curve ’ of the pandemic infection rate , have evolved to form the hybrid workforce of the future , where employees will work from home , the office or anywhere else – wherever they have a secure and reliable connection .
For IT , this crisis has presented enormous challenges but there is a silver lining . CEOs and their boards of directors have come to recognise the impact that IT can have on the business , including how fast change can be implemented , even under such stressful circumstances . accelerated by the explosion of IoT – how security is defined and implemented is now becoming part of the network architecture and not some bolted-on component of the enterprise IT environment .
With the rise of remote working and the hybrid work environment , CSOs and CIOs are clamoring for a connected security approach . When looking at network design principles of the past , security experts essentially started with a policy and then designed a network topology that in turn satisfied policy , which meant that topology and policy were tightly coupled . That dynamic is drastically changing . Networking solutions have evolved to offer significant degrees of separation , where policy gets programed when and where it is needed , and only when and where it is needed .
Now , CEOs and their boards are thinking about lessons learned from the pandemic to make networking , security and the overall IT programmes they oversee more flexible and dynamic . As a result , IT has a seat at the table in pushing forward ambitious forms of Digital Transformation , even accelerating existing planned transitions , emboldened with how the workforce has adapted to what has become known as the ‘ new normal .’
Security must be viewed dynamically – from endpoints , to the Edge , to the cloud
With the maturation of the cloud and the growth of edge networking with its myriad endpoints – all
Zero Trust network architecture solutions will remain a core piece of effective security with traditional IT workloads moving out of the Edge into either the cloud or SaaS environment . The vacuum left behind is eventually going to be replaced by OT / IoT specific workloads at the Edge . Furthermore , with the implementation of 5G , the networking architecture must contend with multi-access edge compute ( MEC )
The pandemic has also heightened the interest in networking automation at the Edge among CIOs and IT leaders .
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