Networking Trends for 2021 from Cisco

Cisco has released the results of a study that examines trends in the development of network infrastructures. It is reported that the transformation of the IT industry will continue next year, due to the pandemic and economic challenges.

In the new normal, IT departments face new demands. This is, first of all, the need to expand the possibilities for remote work, as well as provide employees with access to corporate services and applications from home systems. Meeting these requirements presents many challenges.

The company identifies five key trends that are expected to largely determine the further development of the global IT and network infrastructure industry. One of the directions is the improvement and expansion of security systems in the context of remote work and remote access to corporate resources.

Another trend is called ensuring the safe return of employees to the office after the restrictions are lifted. We are talking about the development of services such as video conferencing and geolocation based on Wi-Fi. In addition, services for monitoring compliance with social distance will be required.

The increased use of cloud tools is the third trend. The authors of the report believe that in the future, the multicloud model will be increasingly implemented - that is, the distribution of applications, workloads and data between local data centers and public cloud providers.

The next industry trend is the automation of network operations. It is necessary in light of the rapid increase in the number of customers, the introduction of new models of application traffic and network services such as e-learning, video conferencing, virtual events, remote services, etc.

Finally, the fifth trend is the use of network analytics based on artificial intelligence (AI) to work with data more efficiently. These tools can help you diagnose and fix problems faster and optimize service performance.