4. Resilience by design
The best networks are those built with the idea that they’re going to fail.
Think about it: Sending an engineer out to fix network hardware every time an outage happens can be costly. But if you build redundancy into the network from the start, you create resilience across the whole system. That way, no single outage can ever impact users’ abilities to access any services.
One way to do this? Invite chaos. Under a “chaos engineering” model, developed initially by Netflix, a tool (referred to as a “chaos monkey”) causes outages at random to test the resiliency of the system. The enterprise can then address weaknesses, strengthen the overall system and have confidence it can deliver round-the-clock availability.
Keep it simple. In lieu of controlled chaos, another strategy is to focus on simplification, as Accenture did with a large insurance company. After developing automations that could spot problems, log tickets and schedule fixes, the time it took to resolve outages dropped by 35%.
5. Build for new ways of working
An organization’s goal should be to let everyone access cloud services from anywhere and everywhere—but with the right level of security, the right bandwidth, the right performance and at the right cost. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is an emerging option. By bundling together SD-WAN and security capabilities, delivering them as a service, SASE provides a safer, easier way to allow access the network from any location.
Smarter security, everywhere. Accenture designed and deployed a cloud-based network architecture for a chemicals company that integrated security across all layers including SASE. This allowed services to be delivered securely for users from offices and remote locations. When the pandemic hit just a few months into the transformation, the company was ready: All users were able to seamlessly transition to remote work thanks to the integrated SASE architecture.