By Mandy Duncan – As 2023 moves forward, the events of the last couple of years have left their mark with staffing shortages, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruption, and geo-political unrest.
These dynamics have accelerated or even forced business transitions and, in some cases, caused a rethinking of fundamental business models.
The network now plays an even stronger role, powering the transformation journey that’s needed to thrive during uncertainty and preparing organisations for what comes next in 2023.
Prediction 1: By the end of 2023, 20% of organisations will have adopted a NaaS strategy
With tightening economic conditions, IT requires flexibility in how network infrastructure is acquired, deployed, and operated to enable network teams to deliver business outcomes rather than just managing devices.
Migration to a network-as-a-service (NaaS) framework enables IT to accelerate network modernisation yet stay within budget, IT resource, and schedule constraints. In addition, adopting a NaaS strategy will help organisations meet sustainability objectives since leading NaaS suppliers have adopted carbon-neutral and recycling manufacturing strategies.
Within South Africa, these types of solutions are ideal for businesses looking to cut costs and will be invaluable for a variety of organisations moving forward.
Prediction 2: Built-in security replaces bolt-on
Reducing cybersecurity risk has become a core operational concern for organisations in South Africa. 2022 was one of the worst years to date in terms of cybercrime, with a severe shortage of security professionals according to a KPMG study.
Transformation to a more automated security architecture is quickly becoming an IT imperative.
No longer can organisations bolt-on perimeter firewalls around the network to protect against threats and vulnerabilities. Security must be built-in to every aspect of the network infrastructure from WiFi Access Points to LAN, campus and data centre switches, WAN gateways, and extending into the cloud.
Zero trust and SASE frameworks will become more intertwined, not only to protect from threats but to apply micro-segmentation across the complete IT stack including users, connected devices, applications, network services, compute, and storage platforms.
Prediction 3: Location services enable new business models and greater efficiency
Challenging skilled labour markets and recurring supply chain issues will force companies to become more efficient, productive, and resourceful.
Pivoting towards achieving situational awareness of assets, inventories, work in process, workers, customers, contractors, and supply chains will enable better control of costs, resources, quality, and intellectual property. This will require merging information technology (IT), Internet of Things (IoT), and operational technology (OT) data with contextual information about the environment.
A new focus will be placed on obtaining the accurate location of work activity and assets, the identity of people and machines, the real-time applications being used and by whom or what, and the security posture of every device and machine.
Within South Africa this will provide business leaders with more ways to monitor operational progress but unlock new efficiencies as well as reducing wastage at all levels of the value chain in sectors such as retail, hospitality and manufacturing industries to name a few.
Prediction 4: IT will consolidate operations onto a single, centralised network and security management platform
More diverse digital technology (IoT) is being deployed by enterprises to improve user experiences and to streamline IT operations.
At the same time, employees and customers expect a better integrated real life/digital experience no matter what the enterprises’ business model is.
These dynamics have added complexity to both the network and security and have made managing the infrastructure more complex. With an intensified focus on end user quality of experience while increasing protection from cyberattacks, IT will look to a single centralised management system with visibility across the network and the ability to configure edge-to-cloud QoS and security policies.
Prediction 5: SLA measurements will be based on User Experience not box uptime and link availability
Even before the arrival of Covid-19 in South Africa, the idea of hybrid working models were being tested in the workplace.
While many have returned to offices since 2022, it is clear that some form of hybrid work will remain in 2023. IT must optimise their networks to meet hybrid working requirements, with businesses having dedicated teams whose priority is to ensure a seamless end user digital experience for employees and customers.
Adapting to a client-based view rather than a network view requires complete end-to-end visibility and application-level insights to know if the quality of experience is meeting end user expectations or not.
Tight control of network performance is no longer sufficient. Being able to identify and troubleshoot application response time and performance issues rapidly and remotely will be essential to ensure a seamless end user digital experience no matter where users connect.
Prediction 6: AIOps shifts from primarily offering insights to delivering automated remediation
As South African organisations pursue digital transformation initiatives, network modernisation is critical for achieving new business outcomes.
However, with the growth of hybrid work, new user engagement models, and challenges resulting from the ‘Great Resignation’ and current skills gaps, IT teams must find ways to achieve greater efficiencies.
With AI, cloud adoption, and access to vast amounts of data now common in enterprise-class network management solutions, automation takes centre stage. Identifying the clustering of similar error symptoms across a full-stack network is leading to orchestrated workflows that will more readily give IT organizations the option to allow solutions to automatically remediate an issue.
The need to streamline IT efficiency and do more with less is driving human-assisted workflows, which will enable administrators to examine recommended changes and their impact, and then enable remediation of on-going occurrences into production.
Mandy Duncan is the Aruba country manager: South Africa