2021 predictions for the Everywhere Enterprise

As we near 2021, it seems that the changes to our working life that came about in 2020 are set to remain. Businesses are transforming as companies continue to embrace remote working practices to adhere to government guidelines. What does the next year hold for organizations as they continue to adapt in the age of the Everywhere Enterprise?

everywhere enterprise

We will see the rush to the cloud continue

The pandemic saw more companies than ever move to the cloud as they sought collaboration and productivity tools for employee bases working from home. We expect that surge to continue as more companies realize the importance of the cloud in 2021. Businesses are prepared to preserve these new working models in the long term, some perhaps permanently: Google urged employees to continue working from home until at least next July and Twitter stated employees can work from home forever if they prefer.

Workforces around the world need to continue using alternatives to physical face-to-face meetings and remote collaboration tools will help. Cloud-based tools are perfect for that kind of functionality, which is partly why many customers that are not in the cloud, want to be. The customers who already started the cloud migration journey are also moving more resources to public cloud infrastructure.

People will be the new perimeter

While people will eventually return to the office, they won’t do so full-time, and they won’t return in droves. This shift will close the circle on a long trend that has been building since the mid-2000s: the dissolution of the network perimeter. The network and the devices that defined its perimeter will become even less special from a cybersecurity standpoint.

Instead, people will become the new perimeter. Their identity will define what they’re allowed to access, both inside and outside the corporate network. Even when they are logged into the network, they will have minimal access to resources until they and the device they are using have been authenticated and authorized. This approach, known as zero trust networking, will pervade everything, covering not just employees, but customers, contractors, and other business partners.

User experience will be increasingly important in remote working

Happy, productive workers are even more important during a pandemic. Especially as on average, employees are working three hours longer since the pandemic started, disrupting the work-life balance. It’s up to employers to focus on the user experience and make workers’ lives as easy as possible.

When the COVID-19 lockdown began, companies coped by expanding their remote VPN usage. That got them through the immediate crisis, but it was far from ideal. On-premises VPN appliances suffered a capacity crunch as they struggled to scale, creating performance issues, and users found themselves dealing with cumbersome VPN clients and log-ins. It worked for a few months, but as employees settle in to continue working from home in 2021, IT departments must concentrate on building a better remote user experience.

Old-school remote access mechanisms will fade away

This focus on the user experience will change the way that people access computing resources. In the old model, companies used a full VPN to tunnel all traffic via the enterprise network. This introduced latency issues, especially when accessing applications in the cloud because it meant routing all traffic back through the enterprise data center.

It’s time to stop routing cloud sessions through the enterprise network. Instead, companies should allow remote workers to access them directly. That means either sanitizing traffic on the device itself or in the cloud.

User authentication improvements

Part of that new approach to authentication involves better user verification. That will come in two parts. First, it’s time to ditch the password. The cybersecurity community has advocated this for a long time, but the work-from-home trend will accelerate it. Employees accessing from mobile devices are increasingly using biometric authentication, which is more secure and convenient.

The second improvement to user verification will see people logging into applications less often. Sessions will persist for longer, based on deep agent-based device knowledge that will form a big part of the remote access experience.

Changing customer interactions will require better mobile security

It isn’t just employees who will need better mobile security. Businesses will change the way that they interact with customers too. We can expect fewer person-to-person interactions in retail as social distancing rules continue. Instead, contact-free transactions will become more important and businesses will move to self-checkout options. Retailers must focus more on mobile devices for everything from browsing products, to ordering and payment.

The increase in QR codes presents a great threat

Retailers and other companies are already starting and will continue to use QR codes more and more to bridge contact with things like menus and payment systems, as well as comply with social distance rules. Users can scan them from two meters away, making them perfect for payments and product information.

The problem is that they were never designed for these applications or digital authentication and can easily be replaced with malicious codes that manipulate smartphones in unexpected and damaging ways. We can expect to see QR code fraud problems increase as the usage of these codes expands in 2021.

The age of the Everywhere Enterprise

One overarching message came through clearly in our conversations with customers: the enterprise changed for the longer term in 2020, and this will have profound effects in 2021. What began as a rushed reaction during a crisis this year will evolve during the next as the IT department joins HR in rethinking employee relationships in the age of the everywhere enterprise.

If 2020 was the year that businesses fell back on the ropes, 2021 will be the one where they bounce forward, moving from a rushed reaction into a thoughtful, measured response.

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