Disaster Recovery Journal Spring 2023

result, IBM notes in 2022, 62% of execu tives said digital transformation was a top priority – up from around 18% in 2018. What’s more, the pandemic accelerated digital transformation at 59% of surveyed organizations. Major political events and geopolitical unrest also changed how organizations are managing their networks and maintaining their connectivity, creating an acute aware ness of just how important it is to maintain consistent connections and protect the data running across them. Wariness over network intrusions, data leaks, malware, and other threats was at an all-time high. While networks are built to endure and protect, they’re certainly not always air tight – a fact that was thrown into stark relief by masses of frightening headlines. Beyond current events, however, cyberse curity remains front and center. McKinsey observes that, at the current rate of growth, damage from cyberattacks will amount to about $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 – a 300% increase from 2015. As a result, most businesses are continually seeking ways to secure their connectivity strategy more comprehensively. Additionally, there rose a higher demand for connecting to third-party part ners and platforms like the cloud. In fact, Gartner notes infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) was forecast to experience the high est end-user spending growth in 2022 at 30.6%, followed by desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) at 26.6% and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at 26.1% – all to support hybrid models and more. Also on the list of net work demands was the unending push for faster, more reliable connectivity which reached further into underserved areas in an effort to close the digital divide. Even in broad brushstrokes like these, the complexity and urgency of network optimization is apparent. All organiza tions, regardless of size or specialty, are looking to find the best ways to deliver exceptional customer experiences and drive better results for their own teams in hopes of staying competitive in a fast moving technological era. For verticals like healthcare, banking, and government, the stakes are particularly high. Businesses

are asking: how do organizations expand the network while extending security mea sures to all new endpoints? How can they create more complex, quick communica tions without breaking the bank? How should businesses incorporate innovative services without disrupting existing oper ations with undue complexity? To fully close the books on difficulties like the pan demic (something we all wish to do), it’s imperative we first must close every gap they created. In short, today’s networks and con nectivity strategies must be more exhaus tive, secure, and capable than ever. That’s an undeniable mission-critical statement. However, this digital transformation can’t come at the expense of a business’s day to-day operations. That means innovating cost – effectively and as simply as possible – while maximizing results, which can be a tough balancing act. The good news is there exists a plethora of network oppor tunities that are ready to help connectivity footprints evolve to suit the needs of 2023 and beyond.

The Network Necessities of Today and Tomorrow As organizations look to make their networks more resilient and secure while reducing latency and optimizing perfor mance, here are some of the technologies and solutions at the forefront: SD-WAN Software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN) are virtualized versions of the traditional WAN architecture. They lever age software and connectivity over the internet and private-line connections to enable new levels of agility and ease in a more cloud-centric, mobile-first business world. Particularly well-suited to larger network footprints which originally uti lized WANs to connect branch campuses or disparate endpoints to information in data centers, this centralized networking tool offers digitally transformative results. It’s a simple truth the business footprint is no longer limited to just an office and a data center – it reaches a host of new end points to utilize cloud computing and other crucial applications on a global scale. This

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