The World has Changed and So Should your Strategy

Kurt Frary, Head of IT / CTO, Norfolk County Council

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many organisations including the one we work for had to change practices quickly, accelerating our adoption of digital solutions including the use of the cloud to enable the continued delivery of services.

At the same time, we had enabled people to work from home en-masse to protect them, our organisations, and service delivery which further accelerated the adoption of the cloud but also changed the organisation’s view of risk.

In addition, many lines of business systems and services organisations use have already moved to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings or are already being converted to SaaS offerings for future releases.

This increasing dependency on Cloud has had a fundamental impact encouraging many to not simply tweak their clearly defined strategy and associated roadmaps but to completely rethink them; and for some to radically rewrite strategies to ensure they are fit for the new future.

Let’s take one foundation building block, connectivity, which is fundamental to many organisations ability to deliver on their Digital Strategy.

Connectivity Infrastructure

The infrastructure is connecting your offices, staff access to your line of business systems, the ability to access the internet and now enabling people to work from almost anywhere including home.

Traditionally, many organisations will be connected using a Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network delivered by a managed service provider enabling access to their own datacenter’s to access hosted applications through dedicated links. This includes access from the data center to the internet and cloud-based applications - a common strategy and one that works and has for many years.

“This increasing dependency on Cloud has had a fundamental impact encouraging many to not simply tweak their clearly defined strategy and associated roadmaps but to completely rethink them.”

Now, if we consider people in many organisations can and do work from home and in the event of a problem with the building or office-based staff could be asked to work from home.

If we then also consider many staff are accessing a line of business systems using their internet, through to the companies data center and then on to access the system hosted in the cloud, instead of their data center, seems not the most sensible or efficient way of accessing cloud services. Therefore the strategy of having a large expensive MPLS network might not be the best or most cost-effective solution for connecting up your offices now or in the future.

There is another way

When many of us work from home (or away from the office) we use our home internet, or when out and about the service in Coffee shop’s, on the train, or in other company buildings to ultimately connect to our company. So if it’s ok in this scenario, why do we need an MPLS network to connect our work offices, and why not instead use Direct Internet Access circuits which are very similar to your home broadband? They are significantly cheaper and less complex; it works the same way for users and takes less overall management.

Another big advantage is that if your users are accessing SaaS-based lines of business systems in the cloud, the traffic can go straight to them rather than back to your data center and out again!

In this new world staff can work safely and securely from anywhere but how do you address security concerns?

Security

Traditional security assumes everything in your connected network is safe and can be trusted and everything outside your network cannot.

In the new world, organisations should also consider replacing traditional security models with a Zero-Trust model which takes the stance “Never Trust, Always Verify” an approach that uses location and user data to validate.

Thinking about your people, the flexibility they need to work safely & securely from almost anywhere combined with, where the applications, systems, and services that they need to access both now and in the future should fundamentally change the way we all think about our foundational connectivity for delivery of our digital services.

Therefore if your organisation has not reviewed your strategy since the pandemic and reworked it, now is the time to do it. If not, it could be costing you money, reduce your future agility and restrict your people’s ability to work flexibly restricting your future agility.

Data Center

SaaS