Mohammed Al-Moneer, Regional Director, META at Infoblox, considers which technologies can help organizations power the hybrid workplace.
Work from anywhere is here to stay and organisations need to modernise their networks to remain competitive. The pandemic has accelerated workplace modernisation, including adoption of virtualisation, private cloud, public cloud, SaaS and IPv6, to create a hybrid workplace – one that provides flexibility without compromising business goals.
Modernisation of networks is required to secure and enable the distributed workplace, support geo-diverse branch offices and save time and expenses. At the same time, today’s networks need to ensure agility, automation and high performance at scale-from the data centre to the network edge.
According to Gartner, more than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the Cloud by 2025. Broader use of cloud and SaaS applications is driving greater investment in technologies that improve productivity, data security and continuous business operations.
Networks are shifting from a traditional architecture focused on headquarters and the data centre to a distributed, edge-to-cloud architecture. To support the hybrid workplace, organisations need to be able to easily secure networks and unify management across cloud, HQ and branch locations.
What are the technologies that can help organisations power the hybrid workplace?
DDI is foundational to new and expanding networking paradigms including private, public and hybrid cloud deployments, IPv6, SaaS, SD-WAN, BYOD, IoT device visibility, containerisation and more.
- Cloud-native architecture, platforms and tools make it possible to automate operations across the distributed enterprise and drive measurable efficiencies.
- Core networking services-DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI)- provide an effective and already in-place, platform to simplify management across the data centre, branch and home offices via the cloud.
- Value-Added Services (VASs) including on-premises and multi-cloud discovery and automation, IPAM sync for Microsoft deployments, global server traffic management and load balancing, reporting and analytics and network change and configuration management enhance hybrid, multi-cloud visibility, automation and control.
Bridging from traditional to modern is hard. While transformation is essential to stay competitive, streamline costs, increase revenue and adapt to changing customer needs, it also exposes companies to new operational challenges and risks relating to visibility, automation and control.
No doubt, the challenges to implementing a fully modernised network are substantial. Business transformation is happening at a rapid pace, so companies need infrastructure that performs with the velocity and scale to handle changing workplace needs-in modern as well as legacy environments.
If enterprises are provisioning direct Internet access for all sites and all workers, reliability cannot take a back seat. And of course, there is a need to reduce risk from the increasing attack surfaces and evolving threats that have grown along with working from home and BYOD.
The good news here, though, is that business modernisation problems and an evolving risk environment don’t necessarily require an entirely new tool set. There’s a common technology denominator for all these scenarios-the services running right now at an organisation’s network core: DNS, DHCP and IPAM, together known as DDI. Today’s legacy and multi-cloud complexities require reliable, real-time DDI to unify, secure, control and automate enterprise network infrastructures.
