State of network edge survey
Graphiant commissioned the 2023 State of Network Edge survey to explore how enterprises are building and managing networks capable of meeting the needs of today’s scale and where they are headed as their networking needs become increasingly complex. The survey was completed by 200 senior, director, VP, and C-level IT professionals in large enterprises throughout North America. Respondents spend at least 50% of their time designing, provisioning, and managing the network edge.
what's Inside:
Introduction
The internet is generally said to have been born in 1989, and since then, there have been significant changes to how enterprises network every 11 years or so. Why? Because as enterprise networks grew, they required additional scale, speed, reliability, security, and privacy.
A Change in What Enterprises Need From Their Network
Since its inception, the core purpose of the enterprise network has been to provide connectivity between all enterprise resources. This means the data center, branch offices, factories, and employees. But the world has changed, and the enterprise must increasingly provide connectivity to non-enterprise resources, including cloud services, customers, and partners.
Building the Network Edge is Difficult
As one might expect, enterprises are doing the best at enterprise connectivity; that’s the use case
they’ve been solving the longest. Yet that’s not to say it is easy. Survey respondents rated enterprise
connectivity as their second most difficult use case, with the most difficult being connecting to
external entities, such as customers or partners.
How Enterprises Build the Network Edge Today
As we saw previously, enterprises predict existing network technologies will start to fail within the next three years. But what are the technologies currently employed by these enterprises? They rate SD-WAN, MPLS, and Multicloud Connectivity solutions as their top three technologies, respectively.
Enterprise Acceptance of as-a-Service Solutions
The Network Edge is changing quickly, and as a result, how enterprises build their network edge is also changing. Many aspects of enterprise computing have already moved to “as-a-Service.” For example, nearly all enterprises have “adopted as their standard” Software-as-a-Service. 81% say the same of Storage as-a-Service (e.g., Box, Dropbox, etc.), and 61% say this of Compute as-a-Service.
How to Transition From Building to Consuming the Network
After surveying 200 responses from Network Architects and Network Admins, who spend at least 50% of their time designing, provisioning, and managing the Network Edge, the results show that moving to a new model where enterprises consume the network instead of building bespoke networks is groundbreaking and what is inevitably needed for the modern business.