Effect of COVID-19 and Work From Home on Enterprise Traffic: Is Your Organization Ready?

These are extraordinary and unprecedented times. COVID-19 has fundamentally changed how we live and work. Business are being forced to think about how they can continue to operate productively when most of their employees are forced to work from home. Organizations generally expect their employees to be in the office and on their network. They use traditional VPN solutions to allow a few remote employees to connect to their network and access internal applications, if they must. At any given time, only a small percentage of their workforce is remote. COVID-19 has changed that completely.

At Zscaler, we have built a cloud platform operating in 150 data centers across the world, that sits in between employees and applications they access, providing them a secure and fast user experience. We operate in 185 countries, and have granular visibility into an organization’s user traffic patterns as we scan it for security and policy compliance. As COVID-19 is spreading, we have seen a dramatic shift in traffic patterns from employees predominantly being in the office, to being remote.

Before the COVID-19 outbreak, average remote employee traffic across a typical large organization was 10% during weekdays and increased to about 20% over weekends. We measure this by aggregating the total bytes seen from employees that are remote and dividing it by the total bytes seen from all employees of the organization on a given day. These patterns were broadly similar across continents with country level variations consistent with their local work from home culture. Over the month of February, 2020, remote employee traffic for Asia Pacific region steadily increased from 10% during weekdays to around 15%, largely driven by China forcing a lock-down in specific regions afflicted by COVID-19. Starting March 9, 2020 we see a dramatic increase in remote employee traffic. The remote traffic ramp in Europe started roughly a week before North America, consistent with the COVID-19 spread and lock-down measures rolled out in specific countries. We currently see 45% of enterprise traffic in Europe coming from remote employees compared to 35% in North America and Asia Pacific. As of March 25, 2020 we see 39% of enterprise traffic coming from remote employees worldwide. We expect this number to continue to rise.

Country specific remote employee patterns are even more interesting. China's remote employee traffic started increasing sharply around January 20, 2020, peaking at around 40% mid-February and has now come down to about 20% during weekdays. India's recent nationwide lock-down caused remote employee traffic to rise sharply to 70% in just a week, similar to where Italy got to over three weeks. United States response overall seems mixed with remote traffic rising slowly to 35%, consistent with only some states enforcing shelter in place mandates, while others have not.

These dramatic shifts in enterprise traffic patterns are breaking legacy security and networking solutions deployed by many organizations. VPN infrastructure is struggling to handle the surge in remote employees. Modern applications like Office365 are delivered through the cloud, yet many organizations use a legacy hub-and-spoke network architecture to force their employees to go through security appliances in their data center. The truth is employees will do whatever is easiest and fastest. They simply want to turn on their laptop, connect to their Wi-Fi and access applications in the cloud directly, without hair-pinning through a choked enterprise backhaul network.

At Zscaler, we have built a platform that enables the world’s leading organizations to securely transform their networks and applications for a mobile and cloud-first world. Our flagship services, Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), create fast, secure connections between users and applications, regardless of device, location, or network. Employee experience and security is identical, whether they are in the office or working from home. Zscaler services are 100% cloud-delivered and offer the simplicity, enhanced security, and improved user experience that traditional appliances are unable to match, especially when such dramatic shifts happen. Organizations don’t have to worry about operational headaches of scaling up and managing hundreds of security appliances.

To ensure organizations can swiftly respond to this situation, we have developed a business continuity program. This program is intended to help organizations give their employees fast, secure, reliable access to applications and services during these unprecedented times and includes free access to professional services.