Networking services can ease network management in nearly every industry. That’s important because highly functioning networks are adding tremendous value to organizations. Three technology benefits illustrate this exciting promise—and showcase how networking services support them. These benefits also address concerns that are top of mind for many organizations—provisioning the growing remote workforce, making use of the data they collect, and boosting network security.
#1: Giving remote workers secure resource access
If a network is an orchestra, the performance hall is getting mighty crowded—in large part because of the swelling remote workforce. Experts predict that the remote workforce will keep growing in 2023—after reaching 25% of all professional jobs in North America at the end of 2022. Employees want flexibility to work from anywhere, while hybrid work is expanding the attack surface.
As a result, organizations must secure access to resources and satisfy increasingly complex regulations. Among the organizations that have moved to a fully remote or hybrid workforce are government agencies, which must satisfy some of the most restrictive regulations to protect sensitive data. Remote work requirements now range from traditional office productivity tools to very complex software and system requirement for applications such as media rendering and CAD.
It’s critical that remote and hybrid workers be able to access the underlying compute resources their work relies on. For many companies, these are cloud-based virtual machines, such as Azure general purpose virtual machines or specialized compute virtual machines that run on NVIDIA GPUs. With networking services, companies can use universal secure connectivity to give even their remote workforce access to their on-premises and cloud resources from anywhere.
App delivery services can ensure that those remote workers have the resources they need to complete tasks, while monitoring services give IT a comprehensive view of network resources and diagnostics, with telemetry data to keep everyone working without interruption. Other technology solutions enable employees, vendors, and partners to access internal and cloud apps.
Equipping remote workers with the right tools—including network connectivity tools and security tools—will become increasingly important because the number of mobile workers is expected to grow from 78.5 million in 2020 to 93.5 million in 2024, according to an IDC forecast. These network users—sometimes called “deskless workers”—will make up nearly 60% of the US workforce by late 2024.
All those workers need devices to connect. The number of 5G connections is predicted to rise to 1 billion worldwide by mid-2023 and 2.6 billion in 2025, according to a CCS Insight study. The demographic trend of “productivity paranoia,” where workers are eager to prove they can be productive from anywhere, also will contribute to new networks and new devices that need to be connected and secured.
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