Technology & Excellence

It’s time to embrace ever-evolving technology to achieve the excellence the Enterprises desire.?

The changing landscapes across enterprises-2018-2023?

A lot has evolved over the last few years in the world of technology and its adoption. Imagine a campus of a large enterprise in 2018 and you will see an image of people buzzing all around and striving to get hold of the physical meeting rooms to collaborate. If you continue the thought further, you can see the fight for the parking spots and queueing up in the cafeterias to buy lunch or a coffee. You will also recall, we all had access to the basic technology to be able to work from home or anywhere, except the intent of the enterprises to allow employees to work remotely. It was strongly backed by the security concerns related to the safety of company data and systems.??

There were many employers who were already providing remote work as an option to attract the best talent, or they were outsourcing to save the operational expenditures in a fiscal year. One fine day, a pandemic knocked on our doors and an event occurred that was not seen in history for decades. At first, no one had a clue how they could keep their businesses running and achieve operational and business excellence at the same time.

The Sales teams were accustomed to meeting their customers in-person to solve their business problems and provide solutions. Many of the businesspeople were living out of a suitcase. The situation now demanded relying on the best-in-class VPN connectivity and collaboration platforms, wherever possible. The risen opportunity was well-tapped by a few collaboration platforms to expand their presence in education sector, small-medium enterprises and across homes.?

By 2020, it was one of the worst nightmares to come true for the Chief of Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) of enterprises. It was crucial for employees to have secure access to company data, systems, and applications from their homes. Whereas Human Resources and team managers had their own challenge of keeping their teams connected and aligned to the overall organizational goals, targets, and vision.??

The employees had an additional overhead of managing home and office from a common location, called home. The boundaries that they had between work and home now started diminishing and the balancing act soon began. Organisations,started rolling out guidelines on how to work from home and to use VPN sparingly only for corporate applications that require VPN access. Employees were enjoying the new freedom of being able to work from the comfort of their homes. ?

As we approached the end of 2020, many enterprises had already upgraded their VPN capacities or created new policies to support home broadband costs for their employees. The motivation of the employees was paramount and so was the overall experience of being able to securely access the data, systems, and applications seamlessly. Many employees were already missing personal connections and were now eager to be back in the office to meet and collaborate with their colleagues in-person. Time again, enterprises worked tirelessly to launch applications that could keep employees engaged on their in-office experience when they are back to work. These applications could give visibility onto how busy the office can be on certain days, whom to expect, they could pre-book seats next to their preferred team members etc. Application architectures were already transforming from Monolithic to more composite applications and lead to launch of many such applications.?

The offices were now equipped with thermal sensors to detect anyone with a higher body temperature (COVID symptom). The office corridors, desks, bathrooms were stacked with hand-santisers and disinfectant wipes. The canteens were offering limited food choices as the turnout was extremely low. The masks were still on but thankfully when on the video calls the masks could be taken off. The handshakes transformed into fist-bumps and elbow-bumps. This period of adapting to the new world was incredibly attractive for the hackers too; the number of security attacks on the enterprises soared and the exposed vulnerabilities were well-exploited. It also derailed many deployments of new network infrastructure and technologies for enterprises as the field force was impacted by the COVID restrictions and guidelines. There was a major impact on the availability of hardware due to shortage of the Silicon Chip and other factors that hampered the supply-chain included the COVID restrictions on the movement of goods between two geographies. It was a wakeup call to many manufacturers to create new manufacturing hubs and diversify their supply-chain. IoT, MPLS, Internet, Collaboration, Cloud Technologies, SD-WAN, Security, everything was put to a surprise test, including people and processes. It sums up the last few years we all went through.?

Was it not an amazing metamorphosis that we all experienced, and the result is a beautiful butterfly filled with colors of Digital Transformation? Well, you would argue, it is one of the most hyped words of the decade, not again. Okay pause for a second, how many in-person meetings have you had in 2020-2021? How quickly the large enterprises, the supermarkets, banks, schools resorted to digital applications to meet their purpose.??

Most of the businesses realised the impending requirement of automation, Zero Touch deployments, secure remote working solutions, and enhanced observability. The agility of enterprises was tested, and they had to create new business models, operating models while we were on the run. There was a shift, enterprises started to trust the cloud more than ever and the on-prem applications started migrating to cloud. The infrastructure was hybrid with mix of On-prem and Cloud and similarly the workforce was hybrid too. There was a dramatic shift in traffic patterns as there were an increasing number of users for SaaS applications. It was as if someone had pressed the accelerate button on the digital adoption.??

?All is well, we are in 2023. The result of the adaptation to these new ways of working has introduced us to state-of-the-art technologies that can change the way many enterprises operate. Remote working is the preferred way of working and has been consistently proved by several surveys and research conducted across the globe. Surprisingly, remote working employees have proven to be productive in many enterprises. These enterprises are those that are driven on Trust based culture and do not thrive on micro-management of employees.??

Thanks to the technological advancements that were made to support this hybrid model at the workplace for the workforce. The Internet is no longer a medium meant for browsing but could carry business critical traffic. The SD-WAN solution could provide a remote-user with the same experience as it would for a user connected to the campus network of his/her office. The application quality of experience (AppQoE) could be measured and guaranteed by the application-aware SD-WAN. The idea of taking all the internet traffic to central data center through set of firewalls to access internet (Central Internet Breakout), started to sound archaic and performance impacting. The enterprises could see the value of utilising the native capabilities of SD-WAN to get the most out of it. The users could break out to the internet from their office directly to access the SaaS applications through secure overlays and economical internet links. They could use the intelligence of the control plane of the SD-WAN to have an optimal and resilient data plane. The neocortex of the SD-WAN network could reside in the cloud and could be scaled as the business expanded. In addition, SD-WAN has opened a plethora of opportunities for embracing RESTful APIs for integration with custom workflows and achieving automation.SD-WAN also offers a set of capabilities that optimize the wide-area network for better visibility, predictability, and performance in the public cloud. This enables enterprises to achieve excellence in business and operations and feel more in control of their own network infrastructure. ?

It was somewhere in 2019 that Gartner introduced the term Secure Access Services Edge (SASE), and enterprises were eager to get a taste of it. The whole idea of SASE was that the SASE solution will bring security to the edge devices and can also offer network and identity services. However, it was difficult to find unified SASE services as most of these services were disaggregated into sub-products or services. It was 2021 that Gartner defined SASE as the combination of SD-WAN Networking and Secure Services Edge (SSE) and introduced SSE as the security solution for the edge that comprised of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Cloud-Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). The SASE propositions are now getting more matured as the enterprises would demand integration between the SD-WAN and the SSE elements to be able to operate with excellence. In addition to this, the availability of the full stack observability across your applications, networks and infrastructure is not an optional requirement anymore. It is the propelling force to take the enterprises to their desired business and Operational excellence. Gartner has published a report on how infrastructure & Operations leaders should use the power of Observability to extend their monitoring capabilities, processes, and culture to innovate and enhance. Similarly, IDC has published their research on how businesses are expanding the digital experience and impact with the availability of the advanced business context.?

What’s next for the enterprises???

The current available technology solutions and options have placed the enterprises in an extraordinarily strong position. It is instrumental that the technology leads and decision makers at these enterprises consider the old saying "proof is in the pudding” seriously and invest their valuable time to experience the value that technology promises. These decisions are long term and must bring value to the overall business. After all, we love the technology when it leads enterprises to excellence.??

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