COVID-19 is driving enterprises to evaluate technologies that can improve network availability and agility, such as SD-WAN, SASE, and network automation.
With little warning, COVID-19 forced large numbers of employees to leave their offices and begin working at home, where they expected fast, reliable access to enterprise services. IT managers had to scramble as the pandemic revealed weaknesses in network infrastructure, planning and management.
"The sudden surge of workers from known, planned and centralized locations to random far-flung corners of the Earth laid bare a litany of cut corners, deferred upgrades and short-sighted choices we had made in our respective networks over the years," says John Annand, a research director specializing in technology roadmapping at Info-Tech Research Group. As a result, flexible and adaptable network technologies, capable of improving network availability and agility during a pandemic, such as SD-WAN, secure access service edge (SASE), and intent-based networking (IBN), weren't available to many organizations.
Info-Tech Research Group’s John Annand, a research director specializing in technology roadmapping, shares his perspective in this article.