COVID

At the WAN Summit in Frankfurt in March, network managers got up on stage and shared what’s keeping them up at night.

The huge shift in enterprise networking over the past two years focused on the fact that, in many cases, COVID lockdowns evicted entire workforces out of their offices and into their living rooms. But the work of some companies was too important to make remote. Most of these were in healthcare, policing, and other emergency services, but there are plenty more ‘key workers’ who had no choice but to stay in position.

Over two years into the pandemic, Covid and how network managers have been responding to it still dominates discussion – and as the world starts to emerge into a living-with-Covid setting, this is more vital than ever. So it’s no surprise that when network managers get together, they want to talk about it. This is why the WAN Summit, the vendor-neutral platform for network managers and solution providers, asked an audience of WAN professionals what they thought in a live poll in London.

Covid-19 caused a once in a generation behaviour shift, with home working moved from an exception to a necessity. In the main, networks held up well, but some important questions remained: