Digital transformation and the ‘work from anywhere’ mantra impacts Hybrid workplace, WAN and Security in a Cloud-first world - As organizations contend with challenges from the ongoing COVID19- pandemic and the new “Work from Anywhere (WFA) normal, the adoption of Cloud-hosted services continues to accelerate.

Hybrid Workplace mixes in-office and remote work to offer flexibility and support to employees which, envisions a completely new approach to workforce management, facilities, and connectivity – where there’s a mixture of employees that come to the office on a daily basis, and those that continue to work from home and visit the office on occasions for meetings and customer engagements.

IT Teams have to manage the arising situation by helping employees move seamlessly and securely back and forth from the home and office.

Cracking the code for a seamless hybrid workplace

How STI solves these issues: We help our customers utilize a cloud architecture to ensure ultimate flexibility and scalability with a single pane of glass for wireless, wired and WAN infrastructure across the campus, branch, remote worker, and data centre locations for a unified operational model and to secure connectivity from home (WFH Employees).

We support our customers extend the enterprise network to the home-office by optimizing the network using policies, securing the network with Zero Trust and SASE frameworks and to gain a deeper visibility and simple cloud management dashboard.

When employees return to the office – we support our customers to ensure employee wellness and safety, using technology to encourage social distancing, contact tracing (using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) can help minimize the virus spread among employees, customers and visitors and assess user density and proximity, so the customer can manage the capacity of your workplace by limiting access when you’ve reached full capacity or modifying floorplans when traffic patterns become inadvertently risky.

Due to the digital transformation, major industries are moving their data centre hosted applications to cloud (Public and Private) where the customers' IT Team’s focus area is to improve the end users experience irrespective of devices and locations. Traditional architecture had routers where enterprises are inefficiently routing all applications from branch offices back to the data centre instead of directly to SaaS and IaaS from branch sites, and this impairs application performance, leads to high MPLS costs, dedicates human resources to maintain different hardware components (Firewall, Traditional Routers, Load balancer, Network management tools etc.) where it failed to adapt to the dynamics.

In the new multi-cloud era, the customer has relied on expensive low-bandwidth leased line MPLS WAN circuits, with some links fully saturated as the bandwidth needs to continue to increase, due to business growth. The traditional WAN architecture is complex and difficult to manage, and much of the network equipment was near the end of life, which greatly limited agility to adopt cloud platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Moreover, the company lacked network visibility, limiting operational efficiency in resolving issues.

Here at STI, we help our customers build a modern WAN solution where enterprises have the potential to increase end-user satisfaction and business productivity through improved application performance, higher reliability, enhanced quality of service (QoS), increased security, improved visibility and control of applications running in their networks regardless of the WAN connectivity service. This helps to build multiple sites with leveraging Zero Touch Provision with minimal human intervention to improve the security, improved visibility, control of applications running in their networks connectivity service, financial and operational cycle.

Eliminating threats and reinforcing cloud security

When it comes to security– moving applications to the cloud also compels transformation of the security architecture, where all apps hosted in the data center could be secured well with private and MPLS connections and a big next generation firewall that performed all of those security functions, but the security perimeter is dissolving as apps move to the cloud, as workers access the apps from laptops and phones, from their homes, from Starbucks, from hotels – security needs to follow.

To support the ongoing security issues, we guide our customers to follow Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), it’s a set of technologies that operates on a Zero trust framework, where access is granted on a “need-to-know basis,” least privileges basis defined by Granular policies. SASE – by defining an edge architecture that combines comprehensive cloud-delivered network security functions, such as secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) and more, implementing a SASE architecture eliminates the cost and complexity associated with multiple on premise devices.