“The next decade of economic performance for every business will be defined by the speed of their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. For the past few years, the cloud has grown exponentially. It should not come as a surprise but if you are looking for data points, this IDG survey is a great resource. Thousands of companies have already migrated thousands of apps to the cloud. So, what’s the next big shift? SASE will play a leading role.
COVID–19 has put more urgency on digital transformation. Millions of employees started working from home. Many will not return to their office as many organizations have already closed small or non-strategic office locations: remote working has crossed the chasm. One of the highly visible effects of this change is the booming adoption of remote working software like Zoom. At least, the stock market has great expectations for these companies’ growth given the new environment we live in. Zoom stock jumped 488% YTD compared to 33% for the NASDAQ Index, as of this writing, in later November.
Large organizations still have sizeable datacenter footprints. In these datacenters, we find applications that haven’t migrated to the cloud but also networking components such as firewalls, load balancers, IDS, IPS, routers, switches and devices managing partner connections. Just a few years ago, it was common to design networks for offices to connect to a datacenter where internal applications ran and internet traffic was filtered. Yet, given that more employees now work remotely, and many applications have moved to the cloud, it is an appropriate time to ask whether these networking components are ideally placed on-premises or if they should migrate to the cloud. As a result, transforming traditional on-premises networks to the SASE model (Secure Access Service Edge) is a rising priority for many large organizations today.