2021 Global Networking Trends Report: Business Resiliency takes center stage – Cisco Blogs

Giving credit where credit’s due

Now that it’s been a while since we dealt with the initial blows from the pandemic, it’s time to pause and appraise.  First, as organizations and individuals, we should take a moment to express our gratitude for the remarkable efforts that our IT and networking teams have led. Without their contributions to the networks they build and manage day-in and day-out, most organizations would have fared much worse.

This isn’t completely surprising. Many employees would not have been able to continue working, and many customers would not have been served. Supply chains would be idle, and the critical applications our organizations depend on daily rendered useless. Hats off and a tremendous round of virtual applause for the networking pros among us!

Looking forward: Beyond business continuity

We should also reflect on the things that we’ve learned collectively over these past several months.  For instance, many had business continuity plans in place, but those didn’t account for the duration of this pandemic nor its breadth.  Moving forward, our planning must extend beyond the confines of traditional business continuance towards business resilience, allowing our organizations to adapt to both known and unexpected disruptions.

The network: an anchor during stormy times

Even if your network stood up well, the pandemic serves as a catalyst to help us all rethink our strategies.  Agreed, it’s not the most pleasant exercise, but we should acknowledge that disruptions are going to keep coming at us and potentially, with greater frequency and with greater impact.  This means there are new requirements for our networks to be able to provide our organizations with the agility to not only bounce back, but to seize new opportunities, go after new markets, enable new services, and support new business models.

5 trends in preparation for the next big disruption

To help you evaluate and build out your strategies, I am excited to announce the 2021 Global Networking Trends Report: Business Resilience Special Edition. In it, we explore ways your networking strategy can support your business resilience strategy. We highlight five networking trends and the need to take a multi-dimensional approach across the workforce, workplace, workloads, and IT operations.

Here are a few sample findings in the report:

As we all know, transforming our networks is a never-ending journey with ever-increasing impacts.  And as much as we’re all looking forward to the day we can put this pandemic behind us, now is the best time to take a proactive approach to prepare our networks to be ready for whatever future disruptions may come our way.

Conclusion

In order to prepare IT leaders and strategists for the next disruption, the 2021 Global Networking Trends Report covers some of the latest trends impacting networks, offers insights on ways to address them, and highlights the adoption status of some of the technologies that can help. Is your network ready?

Share: