Once a privilege for selected employees, remote working became the default for many workers during the global Covid-19 lockdowns, and is likely to continue being an option in future.
Only 7% of Asia’s workforce want to commit to a completely on-site work arrangement, according to a recent report by job portal SEEK Asia. Most of them prefer a hybrid work arrangement, whereby they can work two to three days remotely every week.
A remote workforce can go beyond national boundaries too. Organisations relying on foreign talents will need to enable their employees to continue working even if they cannot cross borders or must return home due to the pandemic. The International Labor Organization estimates that one-sixth of workers globally, or 600 million workers, can work remotely as their jobs can be performed online.
As the workforce becomes increasingly dispersed, organisations are increasingly running business applications, including mission-critical workloads, on cloud so that employees can access the data and tools they need to work from anywhere and at any time. The latest update of the IDC Worldwide Public Cloud Services Spending Guide expects year-on-year growth of 28.8% this year for public cloud services as more enterprises shift to cloud-centric infrastructure and applications.
Network challenges introduced by remote work
With remote work expected to stay indefinitely, it will bring about challenges to the corporate network.
Since more employees will be using virtual private networks (VPNs) to access applications and data from outside the corporate network, more traffic will be pushed to the network edge. And as more users access the network via the edge (i.e., connected devices), more traffic is also being backhauled across the corporate network. Putting it simply, the majority of the network traffic now originates from outside the office and needs to travel to the server room before going back out to the edge. This increases the demand for increased bandwidth around the network edge and across the backhaul links.
“Organisations with a dispersed workforce not only have to support network traffic between their users who are now accessing their on-premise IT environment remotely, but also users who are using applications on a single or multiple public clouds,” says Neil Templeton, VP of marketing at software-defined interconnection platform company Console Connect by PCCW Global.
Moreover, the public Internet – which many remote workers tend to rely on – is not robust enough to deliver the consistent performance required for mission-critical cloud applications on a day-to-day basis. Templeton explains that since those applications are latency and resilience-sensitive they require networks that are “more secure, can perform better, and can be controlled” easily in terms of routing – especially as they often carry critical data.
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This is why organisations are increasingly looking for direct connectivity to the applications, cloud instances, or hosting data centres themselves. With direct connections, they can dynamically scale, better secure access to their resources, eliminate network jitter, and lower application latency.
However, direct connectivity might strain organisations with limited in-house engineering resources if they need to manually create private connections between their data centres, the various cloud platforms they use, distributed IT infrastructure, and business partners. “As more interconnections are required between different parties, it will become more complex and time-consuming for network engineers to manually provision networks and configure the network interface,” says Templeton.
Why NaaS will be key to the future workforce
Adopting network-as-a-service (NaaS) enables organisations to address the needs of the future workforce more effectively.
NaaS is the virtualisation of various network and infrastructure assets to enable a cloud delivery model for several functions. It allows organisations to rent instead of owning infrastructure and applications, and is based on an on-demand model.
Organisations can use NaaS to set up business-critical connections easily, securely, and flexibly, meaning they are accessible whenever and for however long the organisation needs them.
NaaS enables users in an organisation to directly provision ethernet connections in a customer portal, bypassing the traditional manual service delivery processes, and shortening timeframes from weeks to minutes.
NaaS makes things simple. Instead of having to program the network, you can instantly turn up the network as and when needed with just a few clicks.Neil Templeton, VP of marketing, Console Connect by PCCW Global
Organisations can also gain complete visibility and control of the network, as well as elastically scaling bandwidth in real time with NaaS. Since organisations only pay for what they use, they can shift from a capital expenditure (CapEx) to an operating expenses (OpEx) model and be more cost-efficient.
Summing up the benefits of NaaS, Templeton says: “With NaaS, you can see and manage all your services from a single easy-to-use portal. It also offers commercial flexibility as you only pay as you go instead of being locked in a long contract with one provider. Additionally, you are not at the mercy of the public Internet, which you can’t control the routing and may not be secure. NaaS provides the high speed, performance, and security required by your critical business applications.”
Adopting NaaS to gain a flexible corporate backbone
According to Templeton, more organisations are considering NaaS when their existing network contracts are up for renewal because they want to “incorporate the flexibility of NaaS within their network environment”. In fact, research and consulting firm Global Market Insights projects Asia Pacific’s NaaS market to record a 40% CAGR through 2025 as businesses look to reduce the costs and complexities associated with the physical network infrastructure.
However, Templeton notes that full adoption of NaaS is still in its early days and will require organisations to change their mindset. “There’s probably a mental barrier for organisations that are set in the traditional ways of managing the network. They are used to budgeting and buying things on, say, a 12-month cycle, so they are hesitant to adopt NaaS which runs on an on-demand model,” he explains.
He therefore advises organisations to first experiment with NaaS for non-critical services. For instance, they can leverage NaaS for “their application test environments so they can spin up a circuit and turn it down when they no longer need it”. Once they get used to how NaaS works and experience the cost and efficiency benefits, it’ll be easier to make the case to adopt NaaS for enterprise-wide use.
As a distributed workforce is here to stay, organisations in Asia need to ensure their networks, which form the backbone of the enterprise, are flexible enough to support their employees’ needs. NaaS – enabled by interconnection platforms such as PCCW Global’s Console Connect – can help to do so while reducing the complexity of network and connection configuration, empowering organisations to focus on their core business.
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