By Pankaj Kitchlu, Systems Engineering Director (India-SAARC), Juniper Networks
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AIOps for networking will become mainstream: Next year, AIOps will go from theory to practice for many organizations. With the increase of remote workers and the home becoming the new micro branch, AI will become table stakes for delivering a great client to cloud user experience from client to cloud while controlling IT support costs for remote employees. IT teams will need to embrace AIOps to scale and automate their operations. AIOps cloud SaaS will turn the customer support paradigm upside down. Instead of users submitting tickets to IT, AI will proactively identify users with connectivity or experience issues and will either resolve (the self-driving network) or will open a ticket with suggested remediation actions for IT.
AI assistants will become part of the IT team: AI assistants will continue to get smarter and become an integral part of the overall IT team. Their efficacy will improve through learning and direct feedback from the IT team gaining their trust as valued team member. The ability of AI assistants to solve increasingly complex user issues will decrease strain and workloads for IT teams.
Skill refresh will be one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption: Evaluating and implementing AI solutions calls for investment in the IT team. Forward thinking businesses will invest in new skills required by the IT leadership so that they can better understand how to evaluate and implement AI solutions across the business.
AI will be a game-changer in helping enterprises shift to remote work: Leveraging AI helps with operational efficiency and helps deliver higher customer satisfaction. It also helps enterprises better align with business objectives and assure outcomes.
COVID Impact on Networking
Contact tracing will be top of mind for enterprises: With more returning to work in physical offices, there is a need to step up on local contact tracing efforts in India. Enterprises will need to dedicate more time and resources to safely run office spaces with higher capacity.
There will be a shift to more distributed micro-offices: There will be a rise in leveraging SD-WAN as more enterprises look to implementing a distributed workforce model. SD-WAN will become increasingly important for IT departments, corporate strategy and real estate planning as businesses will prioritize setting up small micro-offices as opposed to one large campus. For IT teams, this means an increased emphasis on employees and the end-user experience from client to cloud.
There will be an increase in network equipment spend: COVID has created an environment of increasing network demand for high-speed connectivity, bandwidth and security to deliver internet solutions for employees at home, away. Telcos have an inherent capability and skill set to manage large, complexed networks, especially in the face of the 5G era where digitization is apparent across Enterprises within various business verticals. This presents an opportunity for telcos to bundle services and cohesively manage SD-WAN and value-added services, such as location-based geo-mapping, for enterprises struggling with the paradigm shift.
Networking and location technology convergence will play a major role in healthcare and retail: Both these verticals have seen peak utilizations amidst the on-going pandemic. New ideas are being implemented at faster speeds to enable the successful provision of services amidst current circumstances. Healthcare and retail customers expect to get services quicker. Location technology will be important in helping speed up processes to deliver contactless consumption.
Networking
Network visibility and analytics will be critical to optimize user experiences: Visibility and analytics give IT teams the data to automate and optimize the enterprise network. This visibility allows IT teams to proactively identify and rapidly fix network performance issues, ensuring the best end-user experience.
The network of the next decade will rely on modern cloud architectures: More Enterprises are realizing the value of leveraging the Cloud in current circumstances – from running business-as-usual operations to experiencing shutdowns due to constraints on-premise, Cloud is now an integral part of the networking strategy. Network agility will be more important to the customer experience than ever before, and the only way to achieve it is to build your network in a modern cloud environment that can match the innovation speed of a business’ digital transformation team.
With Wi-Fi 6E and private LTE, enterprises will have more wireless options than ever: Internet connectivity is becoming a necessity for a country and its citizens’ economic prosperity. While internet numbers look impressive in India, the average speed and user experience has a lot of room for improvement. By late 2021 or early 2022 Wi-Fi 6E, which increases available RF spectrum with the addition of 1GHz of spectrum at 6GHz, will be an enabler for the continued hypergrowth of IoT and mobile devices across all vertical industries. Private LTE in the 3.5GHz band will start to appear in the enterprise, to ensure businesses can provide ubiquitous internet coverage to their employees, guests, customers and IoT devices. The future will be a network of networks and AI will be key in managing the complexity.
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