Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Securing and Automating the Hybrid Workplace
By Partha Narasimhan, CTO of
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
We enter 2021 in a
very different place from where we were a year ago. The role of networking and more
broadly, the IT function, has more often become the hero - and sometimes the
scorn - of business continuity and resilience in the face of the pandemic. It's
time for CIOs to look to the horizon and define their approach and strategy in
a post-pandemic world, where security, availability and automation will play a
prominent role in the success of hybrid workplaces.
Aruba has identified
four major trends that CIOs now face that can make or break an organization's
IT program:
- The rise of the hybrid workforce
and how that will evolve during and after the pandemic
- The changing role of network
security integrated across the fabric of the network
- Graduating from uptime networking
metrics to user satisfaction metrics, examining networking holistically as part
of the broader IT technology stack
- Staying the course in implementing
automation in networking operations, despite challenges posed by the LAN, WAN
and Cloud
The Hybrid Workforce is
Here to Stay
Despite recent
advances in vaccines for COVID-19, many roles may still not fully return to the
office until late 2021, and in
many cases, not at all. After speaking with CIOs from across the country, what
is clear is that some amount of remote working will remain after the pandemic
exits. That admission portends profound changes for physical office spaces, corporate
culture, connectivity, and networking.
What many organizations thought
would be temporary remote setups to "flatten the curve" of the pandemic
infection rate, have evolved to form the hybrid workforce of the future, where
employees will work from home, the office, or anywhere else - wherever they
have a secure and reliable connection.
For IT, this crisis has presented
enormous challenges, but there is a silver lining. CEOs and their boards of
directors have come to recognize the impact that IT can have on the business,
including how fast change can be implemented, even under such stressful circumstances.
Now, CEOs and their boards are
thinking about lessons learned from the pandemic to make networking, security, and
the overall IT programs they oversee more flexible and dynamic. As a result, IT
has a seat at the table in pushing forward ambitious forms of digital
transformation, even accelerating existing planned transitions, emboldened with
how the workforce has adapted to what has become known as the "new normal."
Security Must Be Viewed Dynamically - from Endpoints, to the Edge,
to the Cloud
With the maturation of the cloud and the growth of edge networking
with its myriad endpoints - all accelerated by the explosion of IoT - how
security is defined and implemented is now becoming part of the network
architecture, and not some bolted-on component of the enterprise IT
environment.
With the rise of remote working and the hybrid work environment,
CSOs and CIOs are clamoring for a connected security approach. When looking at network design principles of
the past, security experts essentially started with a policy and then designed
a network topology that in turn satisfied policy, which meant that topology and
policy were tightly coupled. That dynamic is drastically changing. Networking solutions have evolved to offer significant
degrees of separation, where policy gets programmed when and where it is
needed, and only when and where it is needed.
Zero Trust network architecture
solutions will remain a core piece of effective security with traditional IT
workloads moving out of the Edge into either the cloud or SaaS environment. The
vacuum left behind is eventually going to be replaced by OT/IoT specific
workloads at the Edge. Furthermore, with the implementation of 5G, the
networking architecture must contend with multi-access edge compute (MEC) workloads
- both private and public - all the more requiring dynamic approaches to security
policy that must evolve beyond the user-centric workflows that Zero Trust is primarily
optimized for today.
End-User Satisfaction is King
Key IT metrics are also evolving. It's no longer sufficient to
just keep the network infrastructure up and running. The metric du jour is user
satisfaction which, from the CIO standpoint, is tied to employee productivity that
can ultimately impact business profitability.
Networking and security teams are
now focused on dynamic experiences that end-users want and expect with the
services and applications they choose to use for improved productivity. Instead
of asking just what kind of devices are connecting to the network, they are also
required to focus on maintaining flexibility and agility while minimizing risk.
The goal of network control goes hand-in-hand with business agility. By applying
the appropriate security measures, CIOs can better facilitate this increasingly
dynamic IT environment.
Ultimately, CIOs want insights beyond the network itself and into availability
and performance applications that the users and business leaders care about.
They are not as interested in how esoteric aspects of the network are
performing, but rather, they're more concerned about whether a specific user had
a poor Zoom experience.
Staying the Course on Automation in Network Operations
Tied to understanding the needs and experience of end users is the
maturation of network automation. But automation progress is not equal across
the entire networking paradigm. In the data center, which is a more controlled
environment when compared to the WAN or LAN, adoption is farther along. Changes
in a data center are driven mostly in a naturally hierarchical structure and is
thus easier to understand and manage through automation scripts.
The Edge (both LAN and WAN), on
the other hand, is a more chaotic environment because changes are triggered by
factors that are not totally within IT's control - namely human and device
behavior patterns that are constantly changing. There is a big need for
leveraging AI and machine learning models to sense changes as soon as they occur
and respond to the ones that seem persistent, even if for a short period of
time. The maturity of deployed solutions that provide this learning component
of automation at the Edge will improve significantly in 2021. There will also
be significant progress in combining these with APIs and other automation tools
that will deliver on the promised efficiencies and insights that IT leaders
crave.
The pandemic has also heightened
the interest in networking automation at the Edge among CIOs and IT leaders.
According to a recent survey of 2,400 IT decision makers across the globe,
35% plan to increase their investment in in AI-based networking,
as they seek more agile, automated infrastructures for hybrid work
environments.
Making 2021 a Success
In 2020, businesses and the
economy were rescued by a raft of communication technologies developed over the
past 40 years, ranging from security, cloud connectivity, to managed and
supported applications over the network. Now in 2021, the four trends outlined here
can provide CIOs and IT leaders with the tools to be better equipped for
navigating the unpredictability of today and beyond. They empower IT leaders from
the top down to strategically position IT as the crucial function businesses
need to successfully maneuver whatever the future holds, from pandemics to accelerating
shifts in work culture trends and environments.
##
About the Author
Partha Narasimhan, CTO at Aruba, a Hewlett
Packard Enterprise company
Partha is the Chief Technology Officer at Aruba, a
Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. He has been with Aruba since the inception
of the company in 2002. At Aruba, he has led wireless product development in
Engineering and later became the CTO for enterprise networking. Since the
acquisition by HP, he has been the CTO for the networking organization within
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). He currently leads a team that is responsible
for technology vision and strategy for networking, spanning both campus and data
center networks. He has worked on multiple networking technologies throughout
his career following a PhD from Rutgers University. He has participated in the
standardization process at the IEEE 802.11 and the IETF.