Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Five Networking Trends
By Brandon Carroll, Head Technical Evangelist at Riverbed Technology
At Riverbed, we have focused on helping our customers quickly scale
work-from-home models with application acceleration and network performance
management solutions that keep remote workers productive and networks running
and secure.
Due to the global pandemic, enterprises have
had to accelerate digital initiatives in a matter of weeks, rather than years,
as a top priority to overhaul their business processes and transform services
to deliver value to their customers and employees.
As organizations continue to support remote
workforces and shift toward work-from-anywhere models and hybrid work
environments, network technology will play a critical role in connecting every
individual, device and organizational structure that together form the digital
enterprise.
With this in mind, here are Riverbed's Five
Networking Predictions for 2021:
1. Continued consolidation of the SD-WAN market
As markets begin to take shape and mature, it
often becomes 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 primary example is the acquisition of SD-WAN
vendor 128 Technology by Juniper Networks in October of this year, a move intended
to bolster the latter's networking portfolio. 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.
As we move into 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.
2. The rise of predictive operations
AI and ML have increasingly played an
important role in approaches to network monitoring. We expect to see the value
of analytics and number of real-world implementations continue to grow,
especially when it comes to identifying active and potential threats when it
comes to the job of securing the network.
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 recognize 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.
3. The
fall of static development
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a remarkable
accelerant for the concept of remote work. Organizations of all kinds were
pushed, essentially overnight, to connect their entire workforce and ensure
business continuity. We realize that the new approaches to remote work - how
each company has chosen and implemented technology solutions - may be permanent
in some cases and temporary in others. Which technologies remain and what
percentages of people work remotely versus in-office may vary, but 2021 will be
the year we begin to fully absorb the fact that anywhere is the new axis,
rather than branch or client.
Increasingly, we expect to see developers
grasp this new reality and begin to leave static development behind. Developers
will see limited return on the idea of developing solutions oriented toward the
branch office and gravitate toward anywhere as their primary development environment.
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 endpoint has become a microbranch. Developers will see the client as the
new branch, finding new scenarios that optimize the capabilities of the client
while also ensuring that new applications and services can be managed by IT
from a single point of control.
4. The emergence of cross-vendor visibility
We advocate visibility of the network and its
implications for the business overall as 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.
5. A new chapter in the client-to-cloud story
How well applications perform 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 center side and the
client side; neither of which is a simple proposition. The acceleration
technologies developed for the data center 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.
A year of change
2021 will be a year of rapid evolution for the
networking technology that has become so fundamental for new ways of working and
operating models in the Covid-19 era. With the whiplash shift to remote work
somewhat stabilized, professionals will focus on the bigger picture and
enduring opportunities that smarter network management holds. Seeing
end-to-end, accelerating end-to-end, developing for end-to-end and innovating
end-to-end will dominate the network in 2021.
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About the Author
Brandon Carroll is
Director, Technical Evangelist at Riverbed
Brandon is passionate
about technology and sharing what he knows with the networking community. At
Riverbed he leads the Technical Evangelist team to help build public awareness
of its NPM, Application Acceleration and SD-WAN solutions. The Technical Evangelist
team developed and maintains the SteelDemo platform, a platform that provides
enablement for over hundreds of Riverbed and Partner SE's globally, delivering
high-impact live demonstrations, along with video and written technical
content. His technical competencies include multi-vendor knowledge including
SD-WAN, Unified NPM and emerging technologies. He's proficient in
Firewalls, Cisco IOS, PIX, ASA, and FWSM, MPF, IPSec, IOS Firewall
Technologies, Layer2/3 Attack mitigation, Identity Management, NAC, ACS and
Cisco ISE, and many other network technologies.