It’s not news that the distributed workforce has sparked several technology and workplace trends. The most obvious change has been the transformation of how and where people work. According to a recent Gallup survey, 45% of full-time employees were working partly or fully remotely in September, 2021.
It’s not just the users who have become more distributed—the applications and data themselves have as well. Enterprises are hosting their applications not only in their own data centers, but consuming SaaS applications that are hosted by third-party providers. Multi-cloud architectures are the norm, and a recent survey of more than 200 IT leaders in the U.S. found that 95% of businesses were making multi-cloud a strategic priority in 2022.
We’re also seeing users accessing enterprise data and applications on more diverse devices than ever, from laptops and PCs to tablets and smart phones. These changes are delivering huge advantages in flexibility, business agility, and efficiency. But they’re also pressuring enterprise operations, IT, and security teams to rethink how they build and support their users, and how they access infrastructure and applications.
Traditional architectures face limitations
Although applications and work models are changing fast, fundamental challenges like security still remain. In fact, analysis by VMware and Carbon Black found that 91% of security professionals reported an increase in cyberattacks due to work from home initiatives. This isn’t surprising, because as users and apps become more distributed, the potential attack surface is expanding as well, even as traditional network perimeters are disappearing.
It’s clear that legacy WAN and VPN architectures are no longer adequate to meet these evolving business needs. Fortunately, VMware SD-WAN™ and VMware SASE™ solutions can help you close this architecture gap. VMware SASE brings together networking, security, and edge services—delivering next-level performance and protection from the cloud. Instead of having these functions reside within the enterprise data center, SASE is all about providing them through a cloud-delivered service. It lets you move the functions from where they least need to be—the data center, where the applications no longer reside—and place them closer to the users and the applications that they are consuming.
VMware SD-WAN, a core element of VMware SASE, decouples networking services from the underlying networks, so application traffic can be carried independently from the physical infrastructure. With SASE, you can take advantage of a software-first approach that’s designed to be easily scaled out, instead of scaled up. It provides Zero Trust security that lets you support a highly distributed set of users, as well as diverse BYOD and IoT devices.
SASE steps into the spotlight
SASE has already been embraced by enterprise organizations, and adoption is gaining momentum. According to a recent ESG survey of global IT and security professionals, 80% expect spending on SASE to increase going forward, and 55% of those who had begun SASE initiatives had a dedicated SASE program budget.
VMware has already helped numerous customers adopt SASE and SD-WAN technologies, who have experienced tremendous success with them. For example, MD Anderson Cancer Center uses SD-WAN to enable radiologists around the country to actually access large radiology files securely from anywhere, for better patient care. These medical image files are huge and must be transmitted accurately and quickly—one glitch and the entire image has to be re-transmitted. The organization’s previous infrastructure lacked application awareness and quality of service, so radiologists could not keep up with analyzing bandwidth-intensive image files in a timely manner.
MD Anderson deployed a VMware SD-WAN solution to support physicians at more than 200 remote offices. When the Covid outbreak forced many of its staff to move to remote work, the healthcare provider was able to rapidly scale its solution up, to support hundreds more users in home offices. The solution gives hundreds of radiologists access to the resources they need to collaborate seamlessly, regardless of where they are working. With VMware SD-WAN, transmission of the files is safe and secure, empowering the organization to comply with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations and ensure that patient data isn’t compromised.
With VMware SASE, you can take advantage of a cloud-based, scalable solution that simplifies your operations, helping you forge a path forward in your digital transformation.
If you’d like to learn more about how VMware SD-WAN can deliver the performance and security you need to keep pace with today’s changes, check out our video from VMworld 2021, VMware SASE: Up Your Game on App Performance and Network Security for the Distributed Workforce. Join Ciaran Roche, CTO of Coevolve and Abe Ankumah, VP for SASE Product Management at VMware. They’ll talk about VMware SASE and how our cloud-native, open, extensible platform helps you enrich a remote workforce experience—providing uncompromised protection with an end-to-end Zero Trust approach in the distributed world with a changing threat landscape.