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Prepare Your Network for These 3 Trends in 2022

By Khalid Raza, CEO and Founder of Graphiant

New Year's Resolutions are often things like exercising more, eating healthier, or taking up a new hobby. But, for 2022, IO leaders will resolve to make effective strategic decisions through evaluating technology requirements from lines of business to be more successful.

As leaders, we know that understanding technology trends helps us make better, more informed decisions. I wanted to share my top three predictions of the biggest trends in business for 2022 that will impact how companies prepare for a successful year ahead.

#1 - The industrialization of the internet

In the comedy classic movie "Office Space," there's a scene where two business consultants question an employee about his job. He explains that he takes specifications from customers and delivers them to the software engineers. One consultant asks: "Why couldn't the customers just take them directly to the software people?" 

A similar question applies to the industrialization of the internet. 

I believe that we will see Enterprise leaders asking themselves more than ever in 2022, "Why can't data go directly from edge devices to its intended destination"?

This "industrialization of the internet" will see a gravity shift of data and where it is generated.  (Which goes far beyond someone's Netflix viewing choices.) The volume of data generated at the edge in healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and other industries is forcing Enterprises to consider how to best access and manage it.

Like manufacturing systems and patient monitors in healthcare providers, edge devices transmit data from a local network to a data center or a cloud service.  As the data shift happens, the connectivity model is flipping. The data most relevant to the business is at the edge and must be processed before being forwarded to its intended destination. Leaders will need to find an efficient method to take data directly to its intended destination.

#2 - Everything delivered as-a-service

Companies have evolved from selling products to selling subscription services. It's laid the groundwork for building stronger relationships with customers providing predictive analyses and other value-added services that can be monetized -- setting everyone up for presumed success.

So, how do we do this for the enterprise network?

The network must be scalable, private, secure, and delivered as-a-service delivery to support this. Just as you can supply your customers with an as-a-service offering, you can smooth your delivery by opting for everything, including your network, delivered as-a-service.  

#3 - Machine Learning processing data everywhere

In my previous prediction of the industrialization of the internet, this gravity shift from the cloud to the edge, whether it's in healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture, or other applications - the raw data needs to be converted into consumable information before its uploaded to the cloud. 

The only way to handle such exponentially large, critical, and in some cases compliance data is to use Machine Learning (ML) models. Machine learning helps protect and make sense of the data and then intelligently passes it to the relevant party without compromising security and compliance. 

As machine-to-machine (M2M) connections grow, B2B connectivity will be required to avoid latency and data loss issues. This new model of B2B communication will require a much more granular level of security and policy controls at the edge. Every business would like to know the partner/user accessing the application and which network they're riding over for their B2B-M2M.

We're entering an unexplored area of IoT- generating edge compute, meaning the network is no longer made up of fixed locations and must become dynamic extremely elastic. As leaders, we will need a more intelligent and safer network to carry delay-sensitive applications.

Ready your network to thrive in 2022

You've heard that second's matter, but with data, milliseconds matter. A data delay of five to seven milliseconds could seriously cost organizations. For manufacturers, a glitch on the floor could diminish performance and product quality. Consider network-as-a-service in the new year as an effective way to thrive as you adapt to the industrialization of the internet, as-a-service, and ML everywhere. Many people talk about the exciting potential of the internet of things, but if it does not evolve to meet these challenges, it will break the internet.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Khalid Raza, the CEO and Founder of Graphiant, is widely regarded as a visionary in routing protocols and large-scale network architectures. In a career spanning over 25 years, he has played an instrumental role in architecting networks for Global Tier-1 carriers and Fortune 100 companies, and defining innovative solutions for the manufacturing, healthcare & telecom industries.

Khalid was Founder & CTO of Viptela. In this role, he was responsible for driving the architecture and vision of Viptela's technology solution and helping create the SD-WAN market. He returned to Cisco as part of Cisco's $610 million dollar acquisition of Viptela in 2017 and took on the role of Distinguished Engineer driving Cisco's innovations and market development.

Khalid, over his 17 years at Cisco, was awarded the pinnacle of Cisco certifications: Cisco Certified Architect (CCAr) and Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE). While working at Hewlett-Packard, he was honored as Distinguished Technologist, and created the vision for the company's Next-Generation Datacenter and Wide Area Network architectures. Khalid holds multiple patents in routing and security protocols and is the author of a book titled "Large-Scale IP Network Solutions".