2023 Global Networking Trends: Executive Summary

Networking in the multicloud era

Secure, simple, and consistent multicloud access is a journey. The destination: SASE.

Get the report

Introduction

IT leaders must be ready for anything, with changing business demands and unforeseen disruptions placing IT organisations under more pressure than ever before. Striking a delicate balance between supporting day-to-day operations and enabling business innovation and agility is key.

The challenge for most organisations is that strategies to enhance business agility, such as moving to a multicloud environment and embracing hybrid work, are creating unacceptable operational complexity and increased security risk. This is motivating IT leaders to embrace new IT architectures and operational approaches.

In the Cisco 2023 Global Networking Report, we explore how organisations are addressing their connectivity and security challenges. Specifically, we focus on how they are evolving their infrastructure to scale connectivity when users, things, and applications have become highly distributed. More than 2,500 IT leaders were surveyed in 13 countries across North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Western Europe.

“Two-thirds of organisations already have more than 40% of their workloads in multiple clouds. And 92% of organisations are using two or more cloud providers.”

Cisco 2023 Global Networking Trends Report

Essential Guidance

The report highlights important trends within enterprise IT organisations and provides essential guidance for IT leaders responsible for their organisation’s journey to an infrastructure that enables business agility, consistent security, and IT simplification. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Pursue networking and security convergence

Increase collaboration between IT teams to simplify operations from access to cloud.

The siloed way in which teams operate within organisations and the traditional models of delivering connectivity are stretching available talent thin and can no longer meet the dynamic network performance and security needs of highly distributed applications, people, places, and things.

Align networking, security, and cloud operating models, tools, and processes to standardize policies, share telemetry, and streamline workflows.

Transition to a converged networking and security model with a SASE architecture.

A converged, cloud-centric networking and security solution delivers the agility and security businesses require, the performance users need to do their work, and the operational simplicity that allows IT to automate and scale secure connectivity wherever and whenever it’s needed.

Adopt a SASE architecture that integrates all the networking and security building blocks required to deliver a consistent and robust cyber security defense while ensuring reliable cloud connectivity from the office, factory floor, or home – and anywhere in between.

Nearly half (47%) of respondents expect to expand their SD-WAN deployments to a full SASE architecture within two years.

“Secure access service edge (SASE) delivers converged network and security as a service capability, including SD-WAN, SWG, CASB, NGFW and zero trust network access (ZTNA). SASE supports branch office, remote worker, and on-premises secure access use cases.”

Gartner IT Glossary, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), as on 2nd May 2023

Network and security technology and operations convergence delivers a new secure connectivity model – Secure Access Service Edge.

2. Adopt cloud-first networking and security

Extend SD-WAN connectivity consistently across multiple clouds.

Connecting to different clouds with disparate cloud models can be complex, time-consuming and increases risk.

Simplify and accelerate connectivity to cloud applications using SD-WAN integrations with cloud, SaaS, and middle-mile providers. Extend network visibility, control, policy, and zero trust access consistently across all clouds to automate cloud-agnostic connectivity and optimise and secure the application experience.

53% of respondents say they are prioritising integration with cloud service providers to improve connectivity to cloud-based applications from all locations over the next two years.

Evolve to cloud-centric security for consistent operations and policy.

Traditional security models are no longer keeping up. In fact, 3 out of 5 respondents said their top multicloud access networking priority over the next two years is to centralise security in the cloud.

Combine disparate security functions into a cloud security platform to make visibility, policy management, and control easier, more pervasive, and more effective.

3. Transition to proactive operations

Seek a consistent user experience through end-to-end network visibility.

While most transactions today take place beyond the corporate perimeter, IT is still responsible for the user experience.

Empower NetOps teams to detect and remediate network issues quickly by adopting tools that provide end-to-end network visibility from the client and across the Internet to the cloud.

51% of respondents prioritize the adoption of end-to-end network telemetry and visibility to achieve proactive detection and remediate issues.

Move from reactive to predictive operations to improve uptime and performance levels.

The extended network is vital to how organisations conduct their business. Any degradation in service or downtime is increasingly intolerable.

Use predictive analytics as part of an Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) toolkit to help your organisation accurately forecast and remediate issues before they impact the network and achieve simpler, faster, and more effective IT operations overall.

Insights for securely connecting your hybrid workforce

Explore this essential guidance in more detail and discover how your organisation can benefit from greater convergence of networking and security with a SASE architecture.

Get the full report