by Scott Harrell, SVP and GM, Intent-Based Networking Group at Cisco
Connected Workplaces for the Return to Work
In 2021, workers will increasingly return to the workplace, but it will be very different for everyone, depending on city, region or country policies, among other factors. For those workers who will return to the office full time, new networking standards, procedures, and space reconfiguration will need to be in place to create a safe work environment.
Reconfiguring the workplace will be essential to adapt to new health safeguards and new working styles. Monitoring space usage and density can help limit the number of people inside the office and adhere to good safety practices while maximizing in-person productivity and regaining office camaraderie.
In 2021 and beyond, the office will need to be utilized for moments that matter. It’s likely that video conferencing will replace in-person, group conference room meetings. To ensure higher efficiency, video to every device and desktop, remote or in person, will require rethinking Wi-Fi coverage and capacity.
Next Gen Wireless Will Enable Business Processes to be Reinvented
5G and Wi-Fi 6 are being deployed across the globe. History has shown every new generation of wireless drives new use cases and rapid innovation. The combination of 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will provide fast, low-latency connections anywhere, with no need for manual network selection or authentication. This foundation becomes an accelerant for the deployment of other next generation technologies and will quicken disruptions across industries.
In 2020, IT teams proved they can move amazingly fast as they restructured their infrastructure to facilitate moving workers to a home office. In 2021, they will look to apply the same speed to deploy next generation wirelessly ubiquitously across their offices. Video communications will be a primary driver of Wi-Fi 6 deployments as organizations look to enable video to every desktop to mimic the rich video-powered meeting style employees have gotten used to from home. Additionally, the increased speed, capacity, security, and availability enabled by 5G and Wi-Fi 6 will create a richer platform for innovation, and we’ll see entirely new business models start to develop by leveraging these capabilities.
Smart Buildings to Improve Energy Efficiency and Safety
In the coming years, the U.S. – along with other world governments – will demand and promote smarter, safer, and more energy-efficient buildings for both new construction and existing structures. Next year, we expect companies to add more sensors and IoT devices to current networks to not only improve energy efficiency and safety within buildings, but to provide more connectivity.
With the addition of new devices and sensors comes increased Wi-Fi congestion and interference within the smart building systems. The availability of more spectrum with Wi-Fi 6e will help IT adapt to the increases in device density and streaming applications, with private 5G filling in the spaces where Wi-Fi is impractical.
Unmanaged Devices Will Increasingly Be Used for Cyberattacks
In 2020, as many as 20.4 billion IoT devices came online. As IoT devices continue to grow, we can expect that they will increasingly be used for cyberattacks. In 2019 alone, the number of cyberattacks on IoT devices surged by more than 300%.
Industrial IoT and OT systems need additional protection to keep critical infrastructure running even while under attack. To prevent attacks from spreading, industries will use end-point analytics to identify IoT and other endpoints and add them to security groups using intelligent segmentation to automatically quarantine devices when unusual behavior is detected.
Automated and Secure Interconnections
While new applications will be primarily built as cloud-native, the business case often does not justify re-platforming existing applications. Therefore, a hybrid environment will exist for the foreseeable future. Network and data center automation will be key in 2021 as businesses need to provision infrastructure and run a continuous development pipeline to orchestrate multiple public cloud and hybrid environments. Infrastructure teams want to retain control over the IT environment and choose which APIs they expose to development teams. The goal in 2021 will be to build an automated and secure interconnect between on-premises and cloud data centers for ease of provisioning and monitoring at scale in a hybrid environment.
Accelerating Day2 Operations
As more IoT devices, cloud services, hybrid workstyles, and personal devices become the norm in the workplace, IT must be able to manage the increasing complexity even as expectations for uptime and availability grow in parallel. Therefore, in 2021 we can expect the need for advanced network analytics will continue to accelerate but also begin to be utilized by more and more teams within IT. AIOps teams will drive the rapid rise in the utilization of these tools within and across NetOps, SecOps, and DevOps teams. These tools will enable the effective upskilling of first and second-line support, empower end users with increased visibility and self-remediation capabilities, and provide disparate teams with shared perspectives and common sources of truth.
Common sources of truth can be exceptionally powerful. To enable this, sharing data and linking automation workflows across systems will become increasingly common. This will enable rapid resolution of issues across teams. The ability to link the automation layer with the analytics layer will enable IT to begin to move increasingly in machine time versus human time.
Security has been and will continue to be a key driver for the transition to machine time. Detected threats need to be acted on rapidly and pervasively across the infrastructure. Since attackers are already leveraging large scale automation to attack businesses, IT must increasingly do the same in their response, bridging detection via SecOps with automation via NetOps to counteract the range of constantly evolving threats. For example, linking identity services and management resources with security detection tools creates dynamic access control and segmentation policies that limit fast-spreading malware as the systems detect and respond in real time — all without human intervention.
These changes will of course benefit the line of business, the workforce, and customers. But they will also provide welcome help to the overstretched and under-appreciated professionals staffing help desks and maintaining critical infrastructure across the world.
