There can be no arguing that the past year has been disruptive to everything we do in our professional and personal lives.
By Andries Janse van Rensburg, channel manager at Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa
Virtually overnight, people around the world had to start video conferencing, remote working, and even virtual schooling whether their infrastructure could support it or not. This has put the spotlight on the secure and efficient delivery of remote network connectivity to a massively distributed workforce.
For their part, internet service providers have had to add a significant capacity to cater to this rapid spike in demand. In South Africa, this resulted in several fibre providers upgrading the line speeds of their consumer customers free of charge. And those organisations still undecided about embracing digital transformation have had to do so at an unprecedented scale speed. It has become as much about business survival as it has been about remaining competitive and catering for the requirements of an increasingly connected workforce and customer base.
A broadband consumption survey has found that upstream bandwidth usage had a significantly higher jump than the downstream data. Before 2020, downloading content was leading the connectivity charge by orders of magnitude. But with network priorities changing, it has become about sharing content (albeit in most instances video feeds and document collaboration). One of the most telling aspects of this has been the need to rethink network infrastructure design. Providers and organisations can no longer account for steady growth but need to address massive spikes in bandwidth demands.
Securing connectivity
Remote workers rely on a mix of wired and wireless devices to access data centre resources, whether in the cloud or hosted on-premise. This means a large amount of sensitive data is being transferred daily over network infrastructure that might not have been designed with corporate security requirements in mind. Critical applications such as email, messaging, voice, video, and cloud-based solutions must all work seamlessly regardless of the employee’s device or physical location.
To this end, this has increased the potential for exposure of sensitive information to unauthorised individuals. The attack surface has become a much more dynamic one than in the past. With so many people working outside the relative safety of the corporate firewall and network, the onus is now on using virtual private networks (VPNs) to connect and collaborate. But each day, more VPN vulnerabilities are exploited by increasingly sophisticated attacks.
In some instances, corporate networks might only have a fixed number of VPN connections available. Not only does this limit the number of employees that can connect at any one time, but it also becomes a bottleneck for those organisations looking to scale up as customer demand shifts. This decreased availability hampers employee productivity and limits the effectiveness of the business in achieving its mission.
And while the likes of SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area networks) are being positioned as possible alternatives, they have not been designed for individuals working from home in mind. In most instances, they are overly complex, expensive to implement, and require specialised routing hardware in the homes of each employee.
Optimising home networks
Instead, organisations should turn to vendors that provide secure and efficient ways of extending corporate network services to remote workers. For instance, wireless access points at home can connect to controller hardware in a cloud-based data centre using encrypted tunnelling technologies.
This enables wireless and wired traffic to be securely sent from the access point in the home to the data centre. For remote workers, this means they can access all the resources they would if they were physically connected to the local area network in the office. Companies can equip their employees with a dedicated, high-performance wireless access point to securely connect all devices to the corporate network without needing a VPN or SD-WAN.
With the pandemic requiring a change in network demand for remote users, organisations must think differently about the hardware, bandwidth, and capacity employed for access. The balance comes in that the performance, user experience, and flexibility of the environment must deliver on what employees need to remain productive without compromising security.