Connecting and protecting everything
If you could start clean with a new network architecture, would you design what you have today? Probably not.
Today’s network architectures are not designed for the era of connectivity we’re living in. They cannot effectively connect and protect our distributed people, devices, apps, and data. They’ve deprived us of our control and left us with complexity.
Not all of us can start completely from scratch, but something needs to change.
Struggling to support a new era in work
For corporate IT, providing secure, reliable connectivity across the enterprise is a significant challenge. In the past, employees worked in an office, and everything they needed to connect to was in a data center. That data center was the center of gravity, and everyone revolved around it. But that center of gravity no longer exists.
Today, apps are everywhere — on-premises, in the cloud — and employees need to work from anywhere. To make matters more complicated, employees often use multiple devices for work — including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and IoT devices. Connecting everyone and everything has become much more complicated.
Protecting our IT environment has similarly become more complex. It used to be easy to draw a box around everything we were trying to protect. Now the perimeter is amorphous and ever-changing.
Legacy thinking compounds that complexity. Many organizations try to address security threats by adding more security layers and more point solutions. That approach makes management much more complicated while still leaving gaps.
It’s not surprising that IT teams are having difficulty keeping up in this complex landscape. According to a 2023 Forrester Research survey of 449 IT decision-makers, 48% of respondents report that they are struggling to support evolving user types and a growing number of users. In the same survey, 39% say they feel they are losing control.
These challenges do more than inconvenience workers or add work for IT staff: They act as a drag on the entire business. According to Forrester, failure to regain control of IT and security will “impact customer experience, employee experience, productivity, competitive advantage, time to market, and the overall risk profile.”
We need an architecture that can support new ways of working and protect everything while reducing complexity.
Embracing any-to-any connectivity
To support a new era of work, we need to embrace any-to-any connectivity — the ability to securely connect any user and any device to any network and any app. When implemented correctly, any-to-any connectivity can support new ways of working while restoring control and eliminating complexity.
According to the Forrester survey, 58% of IT and security decision-makers say that any-to-any connectivity would boost productivity. Consider a remote employee on a laptop with a public Internet connection. That employee could connect to an on-premises server as easily as a cloud-based app via a secure, programmable, infrastructure-agnostic network. They could start working anytime, from anywhere.
Meanwhile, 48% of Forrester survey respondents state that any-to-any connectivity would cut IT costs. A more efficient IT organization could focus on strategic projects. Instead of spending excessive time ensuring connectivity and reliability, IT could spend more time building the infrastructure to support future initiatives.
The rest of the business could expand and innovate as fast as it wants. With greater agility, the business would be better prepared for the growth of cloud computing, a return of in-office work, or any other shifts and changes.
Reimagining the network with the connectivity cloud
The cloud has the potential to help us break free of legacy thinking and implement any-to-any connectivity. However, many of us haven’t taken full advantage of what the cloud can offer. We've adopted cloud services for computing, storage, and applications, but we haven't done the same for networking and security.
With the cloud, we can create a dedicated connectivity layer: one that is Internet-native but compatible with on-premises networks and infrastructure, and globally distributed to reach the modern workforce. This connectivity layer can help us support and protect users, devices, and apps across the organization’s on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure.
To provide that connectivity layer, Cloudflare built the first connectivity cloud: a unified, intelligent platform of programmable cloud-native services. It’s a platform for connecting anything to anything, reducing complexity, and regaining control. With a connectivity cloud, you can support new ways of working and protect everything without adding management burdens.
Taking the first steps toward the connectivity cloud
Most companies don’t have the luxury of completely starting over with their network architecture. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all at once. Just as the journey to the cloud was a multi-step process, you can move gradually toward the connectivity cloud.
Your first steps might be to replace legacy on-premises hardware solutions with cloud-based services. For example, you could replace VPN devices with a cloud-based Zero Trust Network Access service. Instead of looking for the next version of SD-WAN devices, consider WAN as a service. You could also replace on-premises DDoS or load-balancing solutions with cloud-based services. All of these changes will help not only reduce the attack surface but also simplify management, improve visibility, and enhance control.
Moving forward with a new type of cloud
It’s time for a new kind of network architecture — and a new type of cloud to help us all realize that vision. A connectivity cloud enables us to implement a simpler, more efficient, and more secure architecture that provides any-to-any connectivity. With a connectivity cloud, we can better support new ways of working now and better prepare for the future.
This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.
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John Engates — @jengates
Field CTO, Cloudflare
Key takeaways
After reading this article you will be able to understand:
Legacy solutions can not keep up with the complex network environment
How to rethink traditional strategies and approaches to security
How simplifying connectivity results in recovery of lost productivity and faster innovation