First off, Iโm going to make an assumption: Iโm going to assume youโlike meโhave spent a lot more time online in 2020 than you ever have before.
Thanks to COVID-19, we were all at home with nowhere to go. Many people started working full-time from home, and kids were out of school for months as springtime lockdowns extended into summer holidays.
These swift and sweeping changes resulted in all of us spending a lot more time in front of screens which, in turn, has significantly changed the way we connect to and use networks.
Infinera, a network connectivity company, reported that many households have joined the โ4 Comma Clubโ since the first quarter of the year. That means theyโre using more than 1,000,000,000 bytes or 1 terabyte of data per month. Itโs safe to say thatโs a lot of traffic.
Take a look at what makes up the 1 terabyte of data a month, and join me at the bottom of this post for some IT takeaways.
Learn more about DWDM technologies from Infinera.
How does a change in COVID internet habits affect IT pros?
While the data in the infographic focuses primarily on home users, itโs important to remember who many of these home users are: Theyโre the end users youโre responsible for managing who are now working from home.
While you donโt control their home network, your company or your clientโs end users are still looking to you to ensure they can access the applications and resources they need to do their jobs. Youโre also responsible for securing that end user no matter where they are.
So letโs break down how the growth of the โ4 Comma Clubโ affects your responsibility into two bucketsโoperational challenges and security challenges.
Operational challenges
In many households, you can have three, four, or five virtual meetings online at the same time. Say, for example, you have two virtual Zoom classrooms for your kids, a Microsoft Teams meeting in progress for one parent, and a Cisco WebEx meeting in progress for the other.
The bandwidth requirements of each of those sessions adds up quickly. Add in a kid whoโs home from college playing Fortnite online, and a home can quickly overwhelm its available bandwidth.
Iโve lost count of the number of times Iโve heard teenagers being kicked off the Xbox or PS4 because mom or dad had to finish up that Zoom call.
Security challenges
On the security side, 2020 now officially marks the end of the firewall being the perimeter of your network. Itโs been in the works for a long time, but if it wasnโt official before, it is now.
Youโre now responsible for the security of a user whoโs sitting in a network you donโt control. And if your end users werenโt mixing business and pleasure on their corporate assets before, you can bet they are now. So how are your device usage policies evolving? What have you done to improve your security posture in an increasingly remote world?
If we turn our eyes to the corporate network, some of the changes in internet use outlined in the infographic are evident there as well.
If your organization has already fully embraced a cloud model, thereโs likely next to no traffic traversing the corporate network these days. If your organization is still fully on-premises, youโve probably experienced a rush to embrace VPN access. Is your network designed to support that?
For most organizations, youโre likely somewhere in between these two extremes, looking to support end users connecting to a mix of SaaS and on-premises resources, which you control to varying degrees. Has the toolset you use to monitor, troubleshoot, and manage this changing workforce evolved with it?
One thingโs for certainโ2020 has definitely increased our reliance on the network that connects us all. Whether itโs the home network or office network, IT pros are being stretched to solve challenges thatโwhile we could have seen comingโcame at us much faster than expected.
That begs the question: How long until we make it into the 5 Comma Club?
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