Every year, HPE Aruba announces its network trends for the new year from its CTO organization.
We predict six network trends for 2023, as follows:.
2023 has been a year filled with many changes and innovations since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many challenging situations were arising, and IT departments were under increasing pressure to drive new business innovations.
In this competitive world, it's important to stay on top of industry trends and innovations to maintain your competitive edge.
HPE Aruba has announced the five trends it anticipates will have the biggest impact on networking and security in 2024.
Prediction 1: The End of Standalone Firewalls
The rise of hybrid work environments and the rapid proliferation of IoT devices have irreversibly weakened network perimeters, and standalone firewalls are disappearing along with them.
No more firewalls alone bad '‘external‘'‘From good '‘interior‘'‘cannot protect.
Trying to bridge that gap by building more firewalls within your organization only adds complexity, opens up room for error, and slows down your fast-moving business.
Therefore, next-generation firewall appliances are quickly becoming last-generation firewall appliances.
On the other hand, Secure Service Edge (SSE)They are replacing firewalls and proxies with cloud-delivered Secure Web Gateways (SWGs), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASBs), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNAs). SSEs provide a robust security management method for users accessing applications regardless of location.
Meanwhile, IoT security requires segmentation on-premises at the network edge, and firewall services are being deployed directly on access points, switches, and SD-WAN gateways.
Even in the data center ToR with L4-7 security features switchBy introducing next-generation firewalls, East-West segmentation can be achieved much more cost-effectively than traditional end-of-path next-generation firewalls. The next-generation firewall market will continue to decline over the next few years as these new cloud-based and built-in capabilities simplify secure connection management.
Prediction 2: Zero Trust Principles Accelerate Security and Networking Goals
While not all organizations have separate teams managing networking and security, most often have conflicting goals. In 2024, leading companies will demonstrate how they leverage Zero Trust principles to align the interests of these two teams, delivering better end-user experiences and business outcomes.
In a typical organization, the goal of the networking team is to reliably connect people and services and operate them with predictable, high performance.
The networking team encourages people to connect everything easily and avoid complexities that cause interruptions, delays, or slowdowns.
Security teams, on the other hand, are tasked with minimizing risk and ensuring compliance.
Too often, users and their user experience are caught in the middle. Over-implementing security can slow down your business by slowing or preventing users from accessing the apps and data they need.
However, networking teams that are lax in security or seek to circumvent security measures to gain satisfaction can lead to intrusions and ransomware.
Industry leading companies Zero Trust ArchitectureBy adopting this, we define the network as a layer that not only connects the network but also enforces security policies. For the high volume of traffic accessing applications, it would be more efficient to automatically implement these policies at access devices such as access points, switches, and routers. With the right level of visibility, automation, and clear explanation of policies and enforcement, networking and security teams can align their goals and deliver a better experience.
Prediction 3: Measuring end-user experience is essential to improving operational efficiency.
To deliver on employee and customer expectations, IT organizations must shift to service level objectives (SLOs) and service level agreements (SLAs) based on measured user experiences. Users are focused on whether the application they're using is functioning properly, not on what's wrong. If users, rather than the IT department, discover problems first, user satisfaction plummets.
To address these issues, organizations Measure the actual experience of your end usersAnd to ensure infrastructure readiness even when users are not present, organizations should widely deploy digital experience management (DEM) tools. Organizations should especially monitor Wi-Fi performance by using metrics collected from endpoint agents (e.g., SSE agents). Dedicated hardware sensorsYou will want to use a mix of measurements collected from .
Ideally, these metrics should be fed into AIOps to learn best practices, quickly triage issues, and automatically resolve them.
Prediction 4: 6GHz Wi-Fi adoption will surge, and Wi-Fi 7 will continue that momentum.
In most areas, barriers to Wi-Fi deployment in the 6 GHz spectrum will be removed, and adoption will begin to surge.
A few years ago, the Wi-Fi 6E standard introduced support for the 6 GHz band, more than doubling Wi-Fi capacity to accommodate more users and faster speeds. While some organizations have quickly adopted and deployed it, others remain cautious.
First, using the 6 GHz band, especially outdoors, requires government approval. Fortunately, significant progress has been made in this area, and by 2024, most companies will have access to the 6 GHz frequency in most parts of the world.
Second, some companies are cautious about adopting Wi-Fi 6E even though Wi-Fi 7 is coming soon.
Now that the Wi-Fi 7 standard has been ratified, there's no doubt that Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 will interoperate, so 6GHz Wi-Fi deployments can begin in earnest once 6E devices and access points start shipping in volume.
Finally, whether or not enterprises adopt the new Wi-Fi standard depends on whether both the access point and client devices support Wi-Fi 6E. New devices supporting Wi-Fi 6E are rapidly being released, and 6E access points are becoming mainstream.
Additionally, more Wi-Fi 7 devices are coming soon, and these devices can utilize the 6GHz band to provide a better user experience over Wi-Fi 6E or Wi-Fi 7 access points.
This combination of developments is expected to significantly increase the utilization of the 6 GHz spectrum by 2024, enabling faster transmissions and better user experiences.
Prediction 5: AI will liberate IT managers!
There's a saying that you won't lose your job to AI, but to those who effectively use AI. This is becoming increasingly true for IT managers.
The burden of implementing new technologies and maintaining cybersecurity grows with fewer and fewer staff members.
Consequently, the workload for each administrator is increasing. Fortunately, with the rapid advancement of AI and automation, administrators' tasks are shifting from managing and configuring individual devices to defining policies for the entire asset base and ensuring that those policies are automatically and consistently implemented.
AI can also search vast amounts of data to identify anomalies, recommend solutions, and implement them.
It's well known that data is crucial for AI, and that high-quality, large-scale data sets are key to AI. Leading companies around the world will derive AI insights from data lakes representing millions of managed devices and hundreds of millions of endpoints.
Finally, Large-Scale Language Models (LLMs) provide managers with a more convenient way to obtain the information they need through traditional natural language interfaces.
Ultimately, organizations need to empower their IT teams with the AI capabilities managers need to stay competitive.
Happy New Year 2024!
Last year was a very challenging year for the IT industry. 2024 will undoubtedly bring new opportunities and challenges, but armed with the right information, companies can overcome them all and achieve success.
Read about and prepare for the new network and security trends 2024 will bring to successfully achieve digital transformation.
