With the WAN world facing unprecedented challenges, how will buyers and sellers respond? We spoke to 16 people across the spectrum to discover where they think the important areas will be over the next few years.
Jason Snuggs, National IT Manager, Energy Power Systems Australia
My expectation is that the longer teams are working remotely the less likely it is that the traditional office environment will revert back to its old form once the virus has passed. It is more likely that people will become used to the flexibility, additional time from not commuting and other benefits that result from working remotely and this will become more prevalent in many organisations. More broadly speaking this will have major ramifications for society in general.
Organisations will become less reliant on offices as core places of work and therefore less reliant on the network links and associated services attached to these sites. Coupled with migration to the ‘Cloud’ we are poised to see a major change in how organisations networks are structured, and with more people working remotely these changes are likely to see declining requirements as people rely more on home internet connections. There is also the potential for QoS-based home internet services or small business links to gain traction as people look for reliability in their home network to support working remotely, especially in those places where standard internet bandwidth is poor.
These changes will force many organisations to reconsider their network and security architectures to facilitate these new ways of working. Fortunately, we are also witnessing the rise of cloud-based security products from Palo Alto, Fortinet and others that will help facilitate this change and enable CIOs, CTOs and Technology Leaders to maintain security of their environment with much more dispersed workforce than we have seen in the past.