geographically disparate, edge-heavy networks, however, require smarter, more efficient management tools. In 2021, we’ve already seen an influx of increasingly must-have, smart AI-powered tools for self-healing and management functions, threat identification and recovery, low latency remote monitoring and provisioning, and much more.

With a need for efficiency to drive a hyper-automation mentality—dictating that everything that can be automated should be—leading-edge data centers are migrating from command line interface to NetOps automation to stay competitive and prepared for the future.

Increased focus on transparency

From unreported data breaches to deep fakes, there is a new level of distrust driving demand for greater transparency—and not just from consumers. The same week of the Association for Computing Machinery’s fourth annual Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, the association removed Google as a sponsor in the wake of two female computer scientists calling out bias in artificial intelligence and within the company. When it comes to executives, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services reveals that 90 percent say increased business transparency leads to better-informed decision-making across the entire organization. This is good news for blockchain. Growing adoption and new implementation is occurring across industries ranging from entertainment services to healthcare. And with major organizations like PayPal, among others, embracing cryptocurrency, this trend will only gain more steam.

As blockchain-based applications quickly rise to prominence, they may present tempting targets to hackers seeking to capitalize on unprepared and less-resilient infrastructure tools, which is why some enterprises are turning to Smart Out-of-Band management, Failover to Cellular and NetOps automation to prevent outages and possible large-scale data breaches.

Rise in automation

As the escalating IoT market drives the need for smaller and disseminated data centers, the requirement for more efficient network management tools increases. All these changes will most likely lead to a trend toward hyper-automation. Businesses will have to adopt automation to be competitive in the future. As stated earlier, there will be an emerging desire to automate everything that can be automated to improve efficiencies, speed up processes and strengthen business agility. Specifically, the first things to be automated will be legacy business procedures, along with a transition from the command-line interface to NetOps automation. Pivoting to remote work, enterprises that leverage automation will balance and secure the increasing distant connections. Likewise, local IT staff can use automation to augment service recovery and daily routine tasks. Still, the central purpose of automation is to enhance operational resilience to prepare businesses for any external factors that may cause further disruption from cyberattacks, outages, or other events. Automation will enable faster analysis, vulnerability testing and intervention in the event of a compromised network. In addition, it frees up engineers to put their energy and time into building other security and prevention strategies.   

Accelerated transition to the cloud

There was a significant trend among businesses to move services and infrastructure to the cloud even before the pandemic. Files stored on cloud servers are encrypted and offer greater recovery and flexibility. Now, the cloud migration has gone into overdrive. No longer is the trend simply getting to the cloud, but instead a question of who can transition better, faster, and more securely. This massive acceleration into the cloud can be linked to the inundation of remote workers, causing providers to ramp up capacity. As nearly everyone shifts to the cloud, new cloud services will be the next key aspect of gaining a competitive edge, including AWS Network Firewall Services or those offered by major service providers. In terms of resiliency, the cloud will be at the core of every organization’s future-proof strategy, as it permits quick recovery and continued operations despite equipment failure, power outages or cyberattack. Whether a business needs to scale up during periods of high traffic or scale down to lessen costs, a cloud computing solution will provide a higher level of security, which is why so many are making the switch. 

There is no doubt about it: living in the Digital Age has provided new opportunities for businesses. But in the same way we could have never predicted a global pandemic, there is no telling what the future will bring. To improve the odds and outcomes in any future event, organizations can use these trends as a blueprint for success and take steps to prepare their networks.