The global pandemic now hitting almost every corner of the world is forcing countless millions of people to work from home. In one sense, we’re fortunate to now have the technology that allows us to do that. Between broadband Internet access in the home, corporate VPNs, team workspaces and videoconferencing services, many people can continue to do their jobs as effectively as if they were in their regular office environment.

That doesn’t mean it’s all smooth sailing for the IT departments that have to enable and support those critical work-from-home services. Depending on the type of network architecture a company has, it can be relatively easy or significantly challenging to support tens of thousands of employees now suddenly working from home.

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KinderCare Education is America’s largest provider of early education programs. With more than 1400 locations spanning more than 40 states, KinderCare serves 185,000-plus families in its programs every day. The company operates neighborhood childcare centers, corporate-sponsored centers for employee childcare, and before- and after-school care programs.

Until recently, KinderCare outsourced its IT department, but this arrangement no longer met the needs of the quickly growing company, according to Dennis Baker, Vice President, IT Technical Operations and Architecture. “As we transitioned into a growth organization, our leadership quickly realized that building internal technical capabilities was a strategic necessity,” says Baker.

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Ryan Riffle is the network manager for an insurance firm with just under 2,000 employees. The company operates a primary data center, plus another for disaster recovery, to serve two major offices in the south-central US and smaller branches around the country. Three years ago, the company installed a software-defined network based on VMware NSX technology, and now more than 99% of the network operates in a virtual environment.

The flexibility of the software-defined network provides a lot of benefits. Riffle says the company was able to improve its security posture with micro-segmentation for business applications at the virtual layer. (The company does not allow use of its name for the appearance of endorsing any product or vendor.) What’s more, there is no longer a need to have physical third-party appliances that had to be managed differently from the virtual server environment. They were able to remove physical devices, including a hardware firewall, routers and load balancers.

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Digital transformation is a catch-all phrase that describes the process of using technology to modernize or even revolutionize how services are delivered to customers. Not only technology but also people and processes commonly undergo fundamental changes for the ultimate goal of significantly improving business performance.

Such transformations have become so mainstream that IDC estimated that 40% of all technology spending now goes toward digital transformation projects, with enterprises spending in excess of $2 trillion on their efforts through 2019.

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Network environments have become so complex that companies such as systems integrators, equipment manufacturers and enterprise organizations feel compelled to test their configurations and equipment in lab environments before deployment. Performance test labs are used extensively for quality, proof of concept, customer support, and technical sales initiatives. Labs are the perfect place to see how well something performs before it’s put into a production environment.

The primary challenge of running a test lab is the amount of time it takes to provision the test environments. A network lab infrastructure might include switches, routers, servers, virtual machines running on various server clusters, security services, cloud resources, software and so on. It takes considerable time to wire the configurations, physically build the desired test beds, login to each individual device and load the proper software configurations. Quite often, lab staffers spend more time on setup than they do on conducting actual tests.

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Most IT networking professionals are so busy with their day-to-day responsibilities that they don’t have time to consider taking on more work. But for companies with an industrial component, there’s an elephant in the room that is clamoring for attention. I’m talking about the increasingly common convergence of IT and operational technology (OT) networking and security.

Traditionally, IT and OT have had very separate roles in an organization. IT is typically tasked with moving data between computers and humans, whereas OT is tasked with moving data between “things,” such as sensors, actuators, smart machines, and other devices to enhance manufacturing and industrial processes. Not only were the roles for IT and OT completely separate, but their technologies and networks were, too.

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The TCP/IP protocol is the foundation of the internet and pretty much every single network out there. The protocol was designed 45 years ago and was originally only created for connectivity. There’s nothing in the protocol for security, mobility, or trusted authentication.

The fundamental problem with TCP/IP is that the IP address within the protocol represents both the device location and the device identity on a network. This dual functionality of the address lacks the basic mechanisms for security and mobility of devices on a network.

This is one of the reasons networks are so complicated today. To connect to things on a network or over the internet, you need VPNs, firewalls, routers, cell modems, etc. and you have all the configurations that come with ACLs, VLANs, certificates, and so on. The nightmare grows exponentially when you factor in internet of things (IoT) device connectivity and security. It’s all unsustainable at scale.

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I recently had the opportunity to talk to Mark Wutzke, chief solution architect with Allied Telesis, to learn about the company’s smart networking offerings. Perhaps you, like me, don’t know much about this networking company, though it’s been in business since 1987. That might be because the global company, until recently, has focused its efforts outside the U.S. However, that focus is beginning to change, so I wanted to learn what the company brings to the table that enterprises would be interested in.

First, a little background on the company. Allied Telesis is headquartered in both Japan and the U.S. The company has global R&D centers and manufactures its own products. Among the products are intelligent switches and stackable chassis, industrial switches, wireless solutions, firewalls and routers, optics, NICs and media converters—basically end-to-end solutions from edge to core for LAN, WLAN and WAN. In addition, Allied Telesis writes its own operating system software for its equipment, as well as the network management software that provides many of the smart networking features the company is touting today.

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Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is growing in popularity and availability for those organizations that don’t want to host their own LAN or WAN, or that want to complement or replace their traditional network with something far easier to manage.

With NaaS, a service provider creates a multi-tenant wide area network comprised of geographically dispersed points of presence (PoPs) connected via high-speed Tier 1 carrier links that create the network backbone. The PoPs peer with cloud services to facilitate customer access to cloud applications such as SaaS offerings, as well as to infrastructure services from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. User organizations connect to the network from whatever facilities they have — data centers, branch offices, or even individual client devices — typically via SD-WAN appliances and/or VPNs.

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Many companies today have a hybrid approach to their networking and IT infrastructure. Some elements remain in an on-premise data center, while other portions have gone to the cloud and even to multi-cloud. As a result, the network perimeter is permeable and elastic. This complicates access requirements at a time when it’s more important than ever to enable accessibility while preventing unauthorized access to applications and data.

To reduce risk, some organizations are applying a zero-trust strategy of “verification before trust” by incorporating stronger, stateful user and device authentication; granular access control; and enhanced segmentation no matter where the applications and resources reside.

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