FeatureThe rapid and dramatic transition to remote working in 2020 forced organisations to rethink how they plan and manage their networks. Timelines for digital initiatives were drastically shortened to a matter of weeks, rather than years, as organisations overhauled their business processes and transformed services to deliver value to their customers and employees.
Through 2021, organisations will pivot further towards supporting remote workforces and embracing the shift toward work-from-anywhere models and hybrid work environments. As a result, network technology will play a critical role in connecting every individual, device and organisational structure that together form the digital enterprise. Here are Riverbed’s five networking predictions for 2021:
SD-WAN market consolidation
SD-WAN has transformed from an emerging trend to a must have technology for regional businesses. As this market enters maturity, it can become increasingly difficult for smaller players to compete as larger entities begin to invest more fully. As Covid-19 has elevated the importance of how we manage and operate networks for remote work, many smaller SD-WAN players now face increasing market pressures to enter acquisition deals with larger enterprises.
A prime example of this is Juniper’s acquisition of SD-WAN vendor 128 Technology. Larger vendors see significant potential for incremental business growth, in particular with big existing customers, and see acquisitions as a way to expand their roster of SD-WAN features and capabilities which they can use to expand existing service subscriptions.
In 2021, the consolidation of SD-WAN vendors will continue as larger players such as Juniper, Cisco and HPE continue to buy up smaller players in the SD-WAN space that no longer have the resources to compete.
Extended scope for AI and ML
AI and ML have played an increasingly important role in network monitoring as IT teams look for solutions that enable them to shift focus from administration and management to high-value tasks that drive business outcomes. We expect to see the value of analytics and number of real-world implementations continue to grow, especially in the context of security where the technology is proving highly effective in identifying active and potential threats.
But the predictive power of AI and ML is a powerful tool not only for threats, but for operational purposes as well. Taken together, AI-enhanced security and operational capabilities can give us the ability to both recognise existing breaches and predict faults and threats before they happen, determining how they are likely to evolve over time. Significantly, this may open the door to predictive security suites within network performance management. Taking this concept of predictive operations a step further, we even see predictive analysis and rank analysis coming together, allowing us to rank predictions based on their likelihood.
The fall of static development
2021 will be the year businesses accept that it isn’t just the branch or client that IT needs to focus on. We expect to see developers grasp that delivering apps and data anywhere is the new reality, and consequently, they will begin to leave static development behind. In doing so, they will need to consider the proliferation of entry points and end points and are likely to make notable advances in securing the anywhere. In a sense, developers will adapt their thinking to accommodate the reality that every end point has become a microbranch. Developers will see the client as the new branch, finding new scenarios that optimise the capabilities of the client while also ensuring that new applications and services can be managed by IT from a single point of control.
The emergence of cross-vendor visibility
Because apps and data are now accessed from anywhere, and from any device, visibility across the entire hybrid network is essential for the new way of working. Being able to monitor and manage everything that happens on the network will continue to be a business-critical capability in the work-from-anywhere world. Providing comprehensive visibility will rapidly become a priority in the coming year, which will push a number of vendors to reach beyond the purview of their own solutions. We expect to see more and more companies developing solutions that offer visibility into other vendors’ solutions in 2021.
A new chapter in the client-to-cloud story
Application performance in the work-from-anywhere environment will continue to be a priority for businesses moving forward. A number of vendors have taken runs at accelerating applications in the past, from one end or the other, but with limited success. But the power to accelerate applications is a claim we will see re-emerge in 2021, likely rolled into SDN offers.
How the network delivers and handles applications has changed. Luckily, Riverbed was a very early mover in approaching application acceleration from both the data centre side and the client side; neither of which is a simple proposition. The acceleration technologies developed for the data centre and the branch can also be implemented on AWS or Azure, accelerating the cloud, or placed in front of a SaaS application like Office365 or Salesforce. This bookends performance with acceleration in a real client-to-cloud approach. Client to cloud acceleration is a capability that many vendors will promote in 2021, but few will be able to deliver it in a masterful way.
Developing digital performance command centres
Through 2021, we can also expect to see enterprise mobilising the resources needed to build Centres of Excellence for their IT operations. With their focus on user experience rather than IT infrastructure and technical KPIs, these dedicated Digital Performance Command Centres will bridge the gap between IT and management by bringing IT visibility to C-level executives. By providing end- to-end visibility into IT performance from the context of business outcomes, these Centres will enable decision makers leaders to map and plan technology investments in line with business strategies.
A year of change
As it becomes apparent that new ways of working are here to stay, seeing end-to-end, accelerating end-to-end, developing for end-to-end and innovating end-to-end will dominate network decision-making in 2021.
By Moueen Zahreddine, Regional Sales Director, Saudi Arabia at Riverbed.
