Prakash Mana, CEO of Cloudbrink, shares his opinions and Cloudbrink's predictions for changes in the world of work for the year 2024

3.  The shift to hybrid work has sent IT teams into
overdrive trying to fulfill the secure connectivity
needs of a workforce that is no longer office
based but which would need to be equipped to
work from anywhere.
 IT reached for familiar technology, throwing
millions of dollars at VPN.
 This elderly technology is still the most common
choice for enabling hybrid working in its remote
mode but performance and operational
challenges make it a far from optimal solution.

4.  Research by Enterprise Management
Associates for Cloubrink, published late last
year, showed that despite the efforts to bend
existing network architectures to fit the
shape of the new world of work, networking
still hasn’t caught up with the needs of the
modern workforce.

5.  Of the 354 IT pros who took part in the EMA
survey, only 32% of claim that they have “fully
succeeded” in providing fast, reliable, secure
connectivity to work-from-anywhere staff
and 31% admit that performance is still worse
for remote users than their colleagues in the
office.

6.  Hybrid working will continue to become
mainstream, particularly as millennials and
GenZs get into decision-making roles. This
trend will have a profound effect on IT,
shifting investment in the security and
networking stacks from the office to the user.

7.  More and more enterprise services will move
from independent PoP based architecture to
cloud-native and edge-native solutions, slashing
end user latencies from ~100ms to ~20ms.
 Services that resolve last-mile performance
issues will become a growth driver for telcos and
managed service providers.
 Continuing shortages of silicon will push
enterprises to look for software-based solutions
to access and connectivity problems.

8.  Work-from-anywhere will become a universal
requirement encompassing users in the
office, on the road or working from home.
 Enterprise CXOs will no longer tolerate the
increased security risks and lower
productivity of remote/mobile workers but
will demand higher productivity with fewer
breaches across the entire workforce.

9.  AI will put even more pressure on network
bandwidth and performance, particularly in
the mid-mile and last-mile of the network
where most of the bottlenecks occur.
 Demand for network capacity, which is
already doubling every two years, will be
pushed even higher as, for example, LLMs
become small enough to run on laptops.

10.  Enterprises are struggling with the
complexities of multicloud infrastructure to
the extent that Gartner is warning of a retreat
to single-cloud strategies.
 This reduces complexity at the expense of
choice, driving enterprises towards vendor
lock-ins and preventing them from
leveraging best-of-breed capabilities of
different cloud environments.

11.  The OSI model was not built and designed for
the modern age of cloud computing and
cloud networks.
 In 2024 vendors will start to develop self-
reliant, self-programming networks.

12.  Our final prediction is that several anticipated
advancements for 2024 may emerge at a
slower pace or encounter more challenges
than expected.
 The Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) serves
as an apt illustration of this, exemplifying
how outlining a solution can be
straightforward, but its implementation can
be complex.

13.  In the coming year, we anticipate a surge in
demand from businesses for standardized
guidelines for SASE/SSE particularly as it
applies to the hybrid workforce.
 Expect to see enterprises continuing to be
caught in the debate between single-vendor
and multi-vendor solutions, and struggling to
resolve technical integration, vendor
management and cost estimation and
containment issues.

14.  Prakash Mana, CEO,
Cloudbrink