Page 46 - SAMENA Trends - May 2020

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

Creating the Network You Need to Support New Ways of

Working

Running a business during lockdown can
mean you need your network to work in
different ways — some you’d planned

to implement at some point before the
pandemic anyway and some you hadn’t
foreseen.

For some businesses it’s a case of imagining the network they’d
ideally have in place to deal with working in a pandemic.

Networks have already proven themselves to be vital in the current
situation across many sectors — from critical services, through to
home working and out to logistics and manufacturing. However,
in the scenario we find ourselves in just now, organisations are
looking for ways to make changes at the edge of their networks
quickly to support their business. But there may be barriers —
supply chain issues in delivering hardware or issues around
protecting the health of the people installing new services.

It’s challenging us to think differently about how we deliver and
manage endpoints that have the flexibility to respond to changes
over time or to a sudden event. It raises questions around how
we can use endpoints to deploy extra applications or capabilities
quickly and remotely, without shipping hardware or sending
Brian Lappin engineers to site.
Head of Product Management
BT So, how can you make sure your network edge fully supports
everything your business needs in this and any future crisis?

In search of a truly flexible network edge
I’m seeing fresh impetus to implement new network solutions
which would help in times of crisis, with a lot of people looking
at the flexibility and success of the hyperscale cloud model as
a blueprint. It raises some questions, though, about how you
extend this flexibility to the edge of the network in workable ways.
In the current cloud world, you can deploy multiple applications

46 MAY 2020