Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Six Technology Trends in 2021 to Manage IT Internet Reliance
By Angelique Medina, Director, ThousandEyes
The
rapid adoption of digital solutions has been years in the making as
organizations are constantly looking to improve the way they go to market,
innovate, and connect with their customers. But in a year like 2020, when the
disruption to the traditional IT ecosystem has been further compounded by remote work and digitization of everyday activities due to social
distancing efforts, the adoption rate has occurred at warp speed.
As enterprises shift budgets toward the adoption of cloud
services, SaaS applications and software-defined networks, IT teams are faced
with managing a complex ecosystem of services, networks, and providers that sit
beyond their corporate perimeters. Tying this distributed ecosystem together is
the public Internet. But the
Internet was never built to be a business-class network and its inherent
vulnerabilities pose a risk both to the company brand and bottom line. In
March, as companies began adjusting to remote business, Internet disruptions
saw an unprecedented rise, increasing more than
60% as compared to January. Adapting to this new level of Internet reliance and the vulnerability it
introduces is inevitable and there are six trends I see taking form as we move
into 2021 and beyond.
Internet Dependence Sends IT Back
to School
2020
made us all critically reliant on Internet connectivity and for enterprises
navigating the risks of outages, many learned the hard way that the Internet is
a best effort network made up of thousands of distinct providers, operating on
the honor system when it comes to routing integrity. This past year saw
significant Internet disruptions, including several caused by BGP hijacking. Although the biggest outage this
year (which took down a good chunk of global traffic) wasn't caused by a BGP
hijack, it led to service provider CenturyLink/Level 3 accidentally hijacking its
customers' routes, causing widespread disruption. In 2021, we'll see Internet
literacy become a hot commodity skill for IT practitioners so businesses can
quickly identify and address issues in external networks that are beyond their
direct control and reduce the risks of downtime.
SD-WAN
Gets Promoted to the Home Office
In 2021, as remote employees become a
permanent fixture alongside (fewer) branch offices, more SD-WAN technology options will be rolled
out for the home office. Security functionality has been a recent top priority for
SD-WAN vendors, but we'll see a shift in gears as vendors become increasingly
pressured to provide solutions that are scalable enough to deploy in every
employee's home office environment. Rather than solely relying on VPNs to
backhaul or split-tunnel traffic, enterprises will start to adopt centralized
solutions to manage and enforce policies that route employee Internet traffic
securely, with optimal performance.
FAANG will continue to sink its
teeth into the Internet
This
year, major software companies like Facebook, AWS and Google continued to make
significant investments in Internet infrastructure projects including subsea
cables like 2Africa and Grace Hopper. In 2021 and beyond, as online
connectivity remains crucial to power consumer services and employee solutions,
hyperscalers will expand into the role of connectivity leaders as they seek to
provide better access to their services, which are increasingly powering much
of the world's global online ecosystem.
API
Monitoring Cleans House
Demand for touchless features like
voice-controlled activation and contactless payments skyrocketed in 2020. This
type of functionality will only accelerate in the months to come, requiring
extended visibility into the backend systems that power these new embedded
applications and the API integrations that run them. IoT and "smart device"
application performance becomes contingent on third-party API reachability and performance over
the Internet and cloud provider networks. In 2021, end-to-end monitoring
capabilities, from backend to frontend, will become increasingly critical as
touchless solutions become crucial in our everyday lives.
Hyperscalers
Hang ‘For Rent' Signs on their Networks
2020 has dramatically reaffirmed the role of
the Internet as the lifeblood of many organizations' operations. But the
Internet is a complicated web of independent and interconnected service
providers, any of which can impact the experience of users connecting to an
application or site. As an alternative option and means of expanding
monetization efforts, cloud providers and content delivery network (CDN)
providers have been offering access to their private backbones with the promise
of greater reliability and performance - for a fee. As uninterrupted digital
experience continues to become critical to businesses, 2021 will see a growth
in the number of companies that seek to avoid the vulnerabilities of the public
Internet by paying for their own "private Internet."
With
the adoption of each new XaaS, collaboration across IT silos will increase
Cloud-based services are ubiquitous and with
each new as-a-service solution, collaboration between traditionally-siloed IT
teams will increase, as enterprises seek to maintain control of their digital
experience. Migrating apps and services to the cloud means taking on a complex
set of external, interdependent services - requiring a new level of actual
human collaboration, be it network engineers, app developers or security
experts, to operate and manage them. Given that IT teams must operate in a
highly collaborative way across functions, 2021 will see increased use of
solutions that can serve as a common operating language across different IT
domains. Monitoring technologies with cross-stack observability across external
services will become part of the critical IT toolset, helping enterprise teams,
and even external providers, quickly get on the same page to optimize and
troubleshoot faster.
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About the Author
Angelique
Medina is a Director of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes, where she reports on
the performance of all things Internet related, from BGP routing and outages to
edge and cloud-based services. She has more than a decade of experience in the
networking industry.