Enterprises want to formalize WFH network architecture

Enterprises are transforming their networks to better support employees working from home (WFH).

Despite concerns about budget constraints and infrastructure complexity, enterprise network teams are taking steps to formalize WFH network architectures, according to a survey released in July by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). In the survey of 312 IT professionals in North America and Europe, 90.7% of respondents said they wanted to provide a home office user experience that was equivalent to working on-site.

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A popular practice among these teams is to deploy a device (known as a branch) for each remote worker to provide various network and security functions, such as access points and security gateways. Respondents said they would prioritize network security hardware for WFH networks, followed by Wi-Fi, routing and software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN). Many companies also support employee reimbursement for Internet and wireless WAN upgrades, such as LTE, 4G and 5G, to support primary or backup connections.

While the upfront costs of these network upgrades may be prohibitive for some businesses, poor employee performance and decreased customer satisfaction may pose more long-term threats to businesses.

“A lot of companies are trying to figure out who needs it and who doesn’t, and what their budget is,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA’s vice president of research. He added that upgrades can be expensive at first, but many businesses are also saving money by changing real estate and office leases, further supplementing network upgrade costs.

A Tiered Approach to WFH Support

Most enterprises aren't planning to deploy network hardware in every employee's home office, McGillicuddy said. Instead, network teams are identifying which user groups need a better experience and more comprehensive support, such as call center agents, engineers, R&D and C-suite executives.

"Anyone who is customer-facing needs reliable performance and better security -- for privacy reasons," he said. "People working with sensitive data at home need to be protected."

For these employees, the network team customizes installation packages based on role and job function. They might send some employees a small SD-WAN gateway for reliable WFH connectivity and provide funding for others to install fixed-mobile connectivity.

But 42% of the organizations surveyed said they take a no-differentiate approach to supporting remote workers. In these cases, the network team defines a set of requirements, such as deploying network hardware to home offices or upgrading to a software-defined perimeter, and has all employees execute the requirements, regardless of their role.

Network spending has rebounded

McGillicuddy said that while enterprises paused IT and network spending due to the pandemic, they are now increasing planned spending for 2023. A significant portion of these planned investments is in LAN and Wi-Fi infrastructure. He said that BYOD programs have grown and enterprises need to support these devices with higher bandwidth, compliance and security.

Other budget priorities are NetOps and monitoring tools. Before the WFH surge, enterprises focused monitoring on a select number of devices at their corporate sites. Now, they collect data from multiple home offices, all of which generate different types of telemetry data. While remote desktop access is a key part of the troubleshooting toolset, it's difficult to scale out for multiple employees, McGillicuddy said.

To adequately process this data, 95.5% of IT organizations said they are allocating budget to enhance NetOps tools for WFH. Tools such as endpoint monitoring, which traditionally have not been part of the network toolset, are now needed to pinpoint user experience issues, he said. As a result, collaboration between NetOps and SecOps teams is growing as they recognize the need to share tools and insights. At the same time, teams are extending their traditional network infrastructure monitoring to home offices with hardware deployments.

What about SASE?

Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a new thing in the network industry, and people started to pay attention to it during the epidemic. According to McGillicuddy, 81% of enterprises said that they accelerated SASE deployment during the lockdown months to meet the needs of WFH.

In many cases, he said, WFH blurs the line between SD-WAN and SASE, as many network and security vendors have moved to offer platforms with zero-trust network access, SD-WAN and cloud-delivered security.

McGillicuddy noted: "Many of the SD-WAN vendors that enterprises work with have accelerated their SASE roadmaps or have identified specific use cases, such as the extended work-from-home wave, which means they are no longer primarily focused on connecting sites, but more on connecting people."