Three Ways Networking Services Simplify Network Management

Networking services can make network management easier in almost any industry. This is important because highly functional networks add tremendous value to organizations. Three technology advantages illustrate this exciting promise and show how networking services support it. These benefits also address concerns that are at the heart of many organizations’ minds: provisioning the growing remote workforce, using the data they collect, and strengthening network security.

#1: Give remote workers secure access to resources

If a network is an orchestra, the performance hall is increasingly crowded, largely due to the increase in the remote workforce. Experts predict the remote workforce will continue to grow in 2023, having reached 25% of all professional jobs in North America by the end of 2022. Employees want the ability to work from anywhere , while hybrid work expands the attack surface.

Consequently, organizations must secure access to resources and comply with increasingly complex regulations. Among the organizations that have transitioned to an all-remote or hybrid workforce are government agencies, which must meet some of the most restrictive regulations to protect sensitive data. Remote work requirements now range from traditional office productivity tools to highly complex software and system requirements for applications such as multimedia rendering and CAD.

It is essential that remote and hybrid workers can access the underlying compute resources that their work relies on. For many enterprises, 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 allow even their remote staff to access their on-premises and cloud resources from anywhere.

Application delivery services can ensure that these remote workers have the resources they need to complete tasks, while monitoring services give IT a comprehensive view of network resources and diagnostics, with performance data. telemetry to keep everyone working without interruption. Other technology solutions allow employees, suppliers and partners to access internal and cloud applications.

Equipping remote workers with the right tools, including network connectivity tools and security tools, will become increasingly important as the number of mobile workers is expected to grow from 78.5 million in 2020 to 93.5 million in 2024 , according to IDC forecasts. These network users, sometimes referred to as “deskless workers,” will make up nearly 60% of the U.S. workforce by the end of 2024.

All of these workers need devices to connect. According to a CCS Insight study, the number of 5G connections is expected to reach 1 billion globally by mid-2023 and 2.6 billion by 2025. The demographic trend of “productivity paranoia,” where workers are impatient to prove that they can be productive from anywhere will also help create new networks and new devices that need to be connected and secure.