EDITOR’S COMMENT
WHAT DO YOU
THINK WILL
BE THE HOT
TECHNOLOGY
TALKING POINT
OF THE SECOND
HALF OF 2020?
JACOB CHACKO, REGIONAL BUSINESS HEAD – MIDDLE EAST, SAUDI
AND SOUTH AFRICA (MESA) AT HPE ARUBA
According to a Gartner analysis on
the future of work trends 2020,
the global pandemic has forever
changed how organisations approach and
view remote working. The market research
firm predicts that at least 48% of workers
will telecommute, compared with 30%
before the pandemic forced most of the
world’s workforce to self-isolate. Gartner’s
report also suggests that the demand for IT
teams to be agile will be greater than ever.
IT managers responsible for the dayto-day
operations of their organisation’s
network are facing new challenges as
the work environment becomes more
permanently distributed, thereby increasing
the complexity of an already intricate
network infrastructure by several orders
of magnitude. That said, this has given
organisations an opportunity to re-examine
their networks and understand how
Artificial Intelligence can help them meet
the demand for connectivity in the face of
an IT resource crunch.
Despite advancements in technology,
many organisations are unprepared for
the sudden increase in remote workers. IT
teams are put under pressure to set up new
systems at top speed while
also having to deal with
multiple requests for
technical help that
inevitably comes
with news ways
of working.
Even with myriad
hardware, software
and services available
to businesses, some
organisations inevitably
discover that parts of their
operations do not support the
robust security requirements that give IT teams the visibility and
access control they need. This will get worse as Gartner anticipates
5.8 billion endpoints in 2020, when today IT and security teams are
already struggling and often unaware when new devices are being
connected to their network.
IT teams need to be able to have better visibility to better
identify potential threats accessing enterprise resources. While
many vendors preach visibility, where we are innovating today is
in the area of providing organisations with cloud-native software
and services that not only provide unified management and
orchestration, but end-to-end visibility over remote networking
issues that can be addressed from a single pane of glass. In fact,
seamless visibility into the state of WAN, LAN and wireless LAN
infrastructure is essential and critical for a post-pandemic world,
where industry watchers anticipate large-scale remote working
teams to become an enterprise norm.
With a single pane of glass, IT managers can have an integrated
network view to monitor network health on specific devices,
workflows or circuits, where several gateways and security
parameters can be managed.
With cloud-based networks that are flexible and simple, lean
and time-strapped IT teams can do more with software that enables
AI-powered insights to solve real-world issues. Apart from these
essential workflows, AI-based profiling, policy enforcement and
management can also help businesses reduce cyber-risk.
As reported on Gartner’s top 10 Trends Impacting Infrastructure
and Operation for 2020, most organisations are indeed automating
to some level with the intent to refocus staff on higher-value
tasks. However, these investments are often made without an
overall automation strategy in mind. It then becomes crucial for
organisations to partner with network providers that can tailor a
comprehensive portfolio that offers unrivalled scalability and deep
Machine Learning expertise to deliver a highly tuned, autonomous
mobile network.
So, whether users are at home or on-the-go, IT teams can be
set up for success by gaining access to simple and scalable cloudnative
solutions.
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