Today’s organizations rely heavily on cloud applications in order to be at the forefront of digital innovations, and to keep their users connected and their businesses thriving. Cloud innovations help keep organizations competitive in the ever-changing and demanding digital marketplace, with new applications and cloud services enabling businesses to be more agile, adaptive, and responsive to pressing market demands, user expectations, and employee productivity. But for businesses to be as agile and adaptable as they need to be, the applications they use need to be configured and secured consistently, everywhere they reside.
In this new age of mass teleworking, the plethora of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) workforce applications and devices have expanded the network and created many new network edges and cloud edges, which has consequently exploded the attack surface. Research shows that an estimated 70% of the workforce will be working remotely at least five days a month by 2025.
This sudden shift to remote teleworking has accelerated the expansion of the traditional local-area network (LAN), wide-area network (WAN), and data center edges to include multiple hybrid cloud environments, a new, more agile WAN, SD-Branch, and IoT networks.