Post Pandemic, Yesterday’s Network and Security Models Need an Overhaul

Abe Ankumah

COVID-19 sent shockwaves through enterprises, and IT organizations are still scrambling to adapt. As the pandemic pushed millions to full-time work-from home, IT leaders had to accelerate strategies for enabling a more distributed and cloud-connected workforce. IT vision-setters expected steady growth in remote workers, and to see more applications move to the cloud and edge. But they hadn’t planned on seeing a decade’s worth of that evolution squeezed into mere weeks.

Overhauling the enterprise operating model so quickly spawned growing pains, especially pertaining to managing networking and security. Suddenly, IT needed to support a different workforce and application stack. But in many cases, staff are still relying on tools designed for a pre-pandemic world. Worse, they face new security requirements that legacy approaches can’t address, leading to extra effort and complexity in the best cases, and dangerous blind spots in the worst.

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a new way to manage enterprise networking and security that’s designed for distributed workforces and applications. SASE enables a cloud network operations model that’s suited to the way modern businesses work. And it’s becoming a mission-critical technology for the post-pandemic enterprise.

Turbocharging Change

Historically, enterprise IT architectures revolved around centralized corporate data centers since that’s where the business applications and security lived. But what happens when most users suddenly work from home, accessing mostly cloud-based applications? As enterprises discovered trying to adapt their operating model on the fly, serious problems became obvious. Problems such as:

• Poor application experiences: Home-based workers might connect from anywhere. If you’re still routing all their traffic through a centralized data center, you introduce latency that diminishes application performance, especially for real-time video applications such as Zoom.
• Increased risk: Adding thousands of user-owned devices to the IT environment makes it harder to protect against threats. Shifting architectures also make it easier for policies set by security teams to get lost in translation by network admins tasked with implementing them. Additionally, more workers may download web-based productivity applications that haven’t been cleared by corporate security and could pose a threat.
• Operational complexity: As IT scrambled to connect home-based workers, they found themselves navigating a patchwork of legacy management and security solutions, struggling to understand interdependencies, and swiveling between tools to fix problems.
• Pressure to support environments outside IT’s control: Users now access business applications from personal devices, connected to spotty Wi-Fi, over aging last-mile broadband networks. Problems can arise in any link of that chain — problems that users still expect IT to fix — even though IT has no visibility into most of that infrastructure.

If you’re trying to solve these issues using tools designed for yesterday’s architectures, you’re going to struggle. To get to a point where you can spend more time focusing on business outcomes, instead of chasing down trouble tickets, you need a different operating paradigm, one built for the distributed enterprise.

Cloud Network Operations

Navigating these changes requires a modern, cloud-centric IT operating model. Implementing SASE is the most important step you can take to enable it. SASE combines multiple networking and security technologies within …