Network services simplify network management in all industries. It’s important because highly functional networks are adding enormous value to organizations. Three technology benefits illustrate this exciting prospect—and how network services can help. These benefits address key concerns for many organizations—the growing remote power supply, leveraging the data they collect, and improving network security.
#1: Giving remote workers secure access to resources
If the network is an orchestra, the performance hall is becoming increasingly crowded—mainly because of the swelling remote workforce. Experts predict that the remote workforce will continue to grow through 2023—after reaching 25% of all professional jobs in North America by the end of 2022. Employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere, but flexible working is expanding the offensive landscape.
As a result, organizations must ensure access to resources and meet increasingly complex regulations. Among the organizations that have moved to a fully remote or hybrid workforce are government agencies, which must meet some of the most restrictive regulations to protect sensitive data. Remote work requirements now range from traditional office productivity tools to more complex software and system requirements for applications such as media rendering and CAD.
It is critical that remote and hybrid workers have access to the basic computing resources on which their work is based. For many companies, these are cloud-based virtual machines such as Azure general-purpose virtual machines or specialized compute virtual machines running on NVIDIA GPUs. With network services, companies can use universal secure connectivity to enable even remote employees to access their on-premises and cloud resources from anywhere.
Application delivery services ensure those remote workers have the resources they need to get their jobs done, while monitoring services provide IT overview of network resources and diagnostics, with telemetry information to keep everyone up and running. Other technology solutions allow employees, suppliers and partners to access internal and cloud applications.
Equipping remote workers with the right tools — including networking equipment and security tools — will be critical because the number of mobile workers is expected to grow from 78.5 million in 2020 to 93.5 million in 2024, according to IDC forecasts. These network users – sometimes called “deskless workers” – will make up nearly 60% of the US workforce by the end of 2024.
All those workers need devices to communicate. The number of 5G connections worldwide will reach 1 billion by mid-2023 and 2.6 billion by 2025, according to CCS Insight research. The demographic trend of “productivity paranoia,” where employees are eager to ensure they can be productive from anywhere, contributes to new networks and new devices that need to be connected and connected.
