Introduction
The way we work is changing. The traditional model which saw the vast majority of us travel daily to an office or other centralized location and perform for a set number of hours has been disrupted. It has been replaced with a more fluid approach which means that many more of us have the liberty to design our own schedules and choose our own work locations.
A shift to more hybridized working patterns was already evident pre-COVID, but the trend was hugely accelerated by the pandemic and the enforced remote working that it entailed.
Modern post-COVID working patterns mean that some employees continue to operate out of a conventional office, while others choose to work remotely, either at home or some other non-central location. Some split their time between these two modes to the point where old distinctions between face-to-face and digital working are starting to fade. The upshot is that organizations are becoming more and more decentralized, with vital compute functions moving to the fringes of the operation and requiring appropriate support to operate correctly and safely.
Work may have changed beyond recognition, but not all of the technology that enables it has caught up. The enterprise network in particular, so central to all forms of productivity, is lagging behind. Most of the networking and network security technologies we rely on were not designed with hybrid working in mind. We’re not just talking about older legacy standards like MPLS and VPN, but some relatively recent innovations as well such as SD-WAN, SASE and ZTNA. These technologies on their own are simply not optimized for the way we go about our working lives today.
