Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
The Top Three Enterprise Networking Trends for 2023
By Christian Gilby, Senior Director, Enterprise
Product Marketing at Juniper Networks
Enterprise
networks are changing quickly. The ever-increasing amount of data, the growing
adoption of IoT technologies and the expansion of hybrid work have stretched IT
teams to the limit, forcing teams to reimagine both how their networks are
designed and how they're managed.
In 2023, enterprise IT teams will need to get creative, adopting
new tools like AI and indoor location technology to use the network to improve
stakeholder experiences, rethinking how legacy solutions like Network Access
Control (NAC) can be adapted and evolved for a new era of networking and
adopting new methods to keep a network secure for a hybrid team. Below are a
few key trends we expect to see in 2023.
Indoor location
technology will become a key element of the "network stack." Indoor Location, services that leverage
the network to connect visitors more deeply to physical spaces using the
network, have been growing in popularity for the past few years, but we expect
their use to grow substantially in 2023.
Indoor Location is
enabled by wireless technologies such as: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Ultra
Wideband (UWB), camera vision, etc., but BLE will see the vast majority of
adoption in 2023. Line of business influencers (and budgets) will drive IT
purchasing decisions to assure inclusion of this technology to meet business
requirements, as we have started to see signs of in 2022.
Indoor Location is
already being used to give organizations across industries new insight into
user and IoT traffic flows (and hover times) within a facility to do things
like:
-
Enable
better real estate planning, customizing the number of meeting rooms or amount
of space leased to adapt to how users are leveraging the space, especially as
businesses return to the office and many embrace a hybrid work model.
-
Improve
customer experiences in-store in a retail environment by proactively showing
the location of products to customers and routing associates to help customers
more easily.
-
Build safer
office workspaces by identifying employees who have reported an infectious
disease and alerting other employees who spent time with them immediately, as
well as by identifying areas of an office building that were occupied to direct
cleaning staff more effectively.
2023 will be the year of the conversational interface and virtual
assistants for networking teams. While several virtual assistants have come to market, vendors have been
slow to adopt this technology that is transforming IT experiences today.
Virtual assistants are becoming a necessity to help strapped IT teams handle an
ever-increasing amount of network traffic - from both users and IoT devices. We
expect to see more vendors adopt this technology to simplify network operations
while boosting the networking experience for end users. We also expect more
enterprises to leverage these capabilities across the full-stack to provide
insight and automated operations from client-to-cloud.
The line between
networking and security will continue to blur. A trend that started with the pandemic, this convergence will
continue to be a key driving force in the evolution of enterprise tech products
in 2023. Customers recognize that it is not enough to just connect users and
things - you must secure the network and do it in a unified and simple way to
be able to scale with the growing numbers of mobile and IoT devices that
complicate the threat landscape.
Further, NAC will see
a resurgence of interest as new cloud-native solutions emerge to boost identity
management and secure the soaring numbers of mobile and IoT devices.
Organizations will be looking to simplify what has been a very complex solution
to deploy and operate with existing products, bringing access control into the
cloud era, delivering on programmability and the needed agility to secure new
devices that are entering the network at an incredible pace.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christian is
the Senior Director, Enterprise Product Marketing at Juniper Networks. He has
20+ years of product marketing, management and engineering experience in the
networking industry with a strong focus on mobility, AI, cloud and wireless and
speaks often at industry events globally. He currently leads product marketing
for the AI-Driven Enterprise portfolio (AI, Wi-Fi, switching, IoT, location),
having joined Juniper through the acquisition of Mist. Previously he led
product marketing for wired, wireless and branch solutions at Aruba (acquired
by HPE).