8 Key Trends for Enterprise Networks in 2021

Whilst 2020 was a year of forced adoption of remote working, it meant that many more strategic network development plans were put on hold. Going into 2021 there are a number of key areas where we expect particular focus and activity from enterprises.

There is a lot of vendor hype around the advent of Secure Access Service Edge (“sassy”). SASE architectures envisage the coming together of networks and security capability to deliver a cloud-native network platform. 2020 has been a pivotal year in moving the mindset away from connecting physical buildings and central data centres towards connecting users and devices (wherever they may be) to applications (wherever they may be hosted). Whilst products and capabilities are still evolving, enterprises should start mapping their strategy and roadmaps to evolve towards a SASE architecture. We see this very much as an evolution, with SD-WAN being one of the foundations, supported by increasing capabilities of cloud-based security services.

Another key area for large organisations is the increased use of automation in order to manage the complexity of network environments efficiently and to maximise performance. We see this as a multi-year journey that should be planned and covers many aspects such as monitoring and telemetry, APIs, orchestration, event correlation, AI, auto-ticketing. Developing such a strategy needs to not only focus on the specific benefits but also consider the wider IT service management environment and the ability to maintain a fully accurate configuration management database (CMDB) to underpin the automation ambition.

SD-WAN has already become the default WAN technology, but it can be deployed in a number of different ways from simple router replacement through to an ecosystem of virtual network functions (VNFs) centrally orchestrated and utilising multiple underlay technologies. We expect continued migration to SD-WAN from more traditional technologies.  Those who have already adopted SD-WAN will look to exploit further the capabilities through increased adoption of universal CPE and VNFs to rationalise hardware as well as the exploitation of different technologies to complement or replace MPLS WAN services (eg. direct internet, broadband, 4G/5G). Enterprises will increasingly look to deploy local internet breakout for cloud and SaaS access.

Whilst moving forward with new technologies, organisations should also pay attention to their use of legacy services to ensure that technical debt issues are identified and addressed.  Many countries are working toward the switch-off of traditional PSTN and ISDN services in the next few years. [e.g. UK has now ended supply and will switch off in 2025, Germany has largely completed its switch over]. Many organisations have often forgotten reliance on legacy services e.g. for monitoring and alarm lines, elevator comms and even the fax machine, much loved of the legal profession. Whilst this hasn’t had significant focus to date, we see 2021 as a year to assess the legacy issue, and to build remediation and migration plans.

Cloud based voice services are already well established and now cloud based contact centre solutions have really come of age. Organisations with legacy on-site or hosted infrastructure will continue to migrate to the as-a-service models in order to benefit from the inherent flexibility and scalability of such services. Enterprises also need to determine the strategy to integrate with unified comms and collaboration (UCC) services and remove duplicated capability and cost. Many organisations will be actively removing office phones in favour of unified comms on the desktop.

With a lot of fanfare, initial 5G capabilities are beginning to be rolled-out by the telcos, though it will be a little time until the full suite of 5G service are delivered and can be exploited by enterprises. However, many countries are opening up spectrum to be licenced for local private 5G deployments. Potentially attractive to organisations with large campus sites (e.g transport hubs, factories, mineral mines) this could bring forward some of the performance benefits from 5G. Enterprises should be considering the use-cases and potential benefits whilst recognising that the performance levels possible are dictated by the frequency bands available (above 24GHz for the highest performance).

These services will continue to take a leading role, yet many organisations have a number of overlapping and competing solutions – Teams, Zoom, video-rooms etc. With the enforced remote working, users have become very familiar and mostly very comfortable in utilising such capability. A clear strategy to rationalise services and ensure full rollouts and adoption of preferred solutions is a must to maximise collaboration whilst optimising costs.

Traditional VPN based remote access solutions have sometimes struggled to cope with the volume and complexity from the mass homeworking of 2020. Newer technologies, utilising “zero trust” principles are gaining ground and should be investigated to enhance security, scalability and flexibility. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) approaches are aimed at creating an identity-based and context-based access boundary, with the ability to grant access to specific applications or resources via a trust broker. ZTNA can form a building block within a wider SASE and Zero Trust strategy.