The risk, if they are not, is high; employees will be frustrated and will look for other alternatives and applications of general use. This causes the shadow IT (ie invisible IT), that is, the technologies used without the approval of the IT department, to be strengthened generating great risks of information security. Companies need to ensure that their network infrastructures are scalable and always up and running, allowing quick and secure access to company resources, even when the work environment is highly distributed, and without having a negative impact on employee productivity. To achieve these goals, IT departments must focus on the different dimensions of the network:
Most of the time, virtual assistants are especially useful for solo entrepreneurs or small startups that need the help and support with things like administrative tasks but don’t necessarily have the need or the budget for a fully established office.
Application-level intelligence: The network must support applications reliably and intelligently, must be able to recognize applications and must determine the level of relevance of applications and services. You must load balance the application’s servers to obtain high availability and the best performance of the application, in addition to globally redirecting traffic to other sites in order to allow business continuity when the data center is not available or works at the limit of your ability.
Monitoring and analysis from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning : Today’s networks are so complex and dynamic that managing them manually could cause the model to fail. Taking advantage of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, allows not only continuous monitoring and analysis of application and user behavior, but also high availability, high throughput and anomaly detection.
SD-WAN is more important than ever: SD-WAN, a software-defined wide area network, dynamically connects users directly with the resources they need, whether applications or virtual offices housed in data centers, digital workspaces on cloud or any other resource, on-premises or in the cloud. At the same time, it automatically selects the best route for data traffic and dynamically distributes it across multiple routes to deliver the best possible application throughput. This makes SD-WAN a key factor in a distributed work context.
Security based on “zero trust”: Not focusing on security, even in these moments, when it seems that there are other priorities, can have serious consequences for companies. The new normality of distributed work requires a zero trust mentality and architecture, that is, an organization should never trust any user or device on the network. To this end, companies need to combine continuous identity management and access to a specific application with constant analysis of the endpoint and user behavior. Ideally, it can be enhanced with an automatic incident response, based on learning. This allows security teams to close the breaches quickly, reducing the possibilities of threats.
Finally, the world is moving towards digitalization more quickly and we see how work does not need to be tied to a physical place when, in reality, we can do it anywhere. This will be the new normal and the network design has to accompany this process. Remote work and business continuity – now and in the long term – need secure, smartly designed networks. But above all, they help to provide a good work experience.