The C-Suite and business leaders understand the value of technology and the benefits it can bring to their bottom line, but there is one key technological shift on the horizon that they can’t afford to ignore. Networking at the edge.

Over the next few years, organizations in every industry will experience change on an unprecedented scale as people, digital devices, smart technologies, and an ever-expanding network come together to transform commerce, work, education, healthcare, recreation, and more. A whole new range of possibilities emerges when we can engage with literally every device and build intelligence and connectivity into physical objects such as office furniture and clothing. The path to 2030 will spawn new customer-centric businesses, enable entirely new industries and reinvent existing ones, challenge us to adapt and evolve, and facilitate greater access, equity, and inclusion across every aspect of society – this is the potential of the Edge. We define the Edge as the new experiences being enabled by edge technologies for customers, employees, students, patients, and any users of network services.

Jacob Chacko, Regional Director – ME and SA, Aruba

Smart meets digital at the Edge – smart conference rooms, smart assembly lines, smart menu ordering, smart stadiums, and a range of technology-enabled smart experiences. The opportunity at the Edge is driven by many things, including smart applications powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, data analysis, next-generation Wi-Fi, 5G communications, and “edge-to-cloud computing.”

Transformational Aspects of Edge-Based Strategies

Edge-based strategies are driving five critical shifts shaping the future of business and work:

1. User Empowerment – The technologies are enabling a fundamental redesign of the user experience – be they customer, student, patient, or employee – giving users the tools to define what they want, how they want it, and even how they want to pay for it.
2. Transformational Leadership – The scalability and rapid capability enhancements of exponentially advancing technologies such as AI, ML, IoT, and cloud computing are enabling leaders to pursue and deliver experiments to drive 2x to 10x greater improvements across their businesses.
3. The Pursuit of Digital Innovation and Excellence – The increasingly central role of digital technologies demands that we raise digital literacy across the organization and prioritize the rapid evolution of our digital capability to accelerate the adoption of a digital mindset and speed up the creation of digitally based products and services based on insights generated from data collected.
4. Embracing and Embedding Smart – The Edge is helping organizations embrace the true power of smart devices to deliver mass customization and deep personalization of a range of user experiences. Rapid advancements in AI and ML are enabling the establishment of smart spaces and creating the opportunity for smart personalization, adaptation, and continuous learning in the applications offered to users.
5. Emergence of New Businesses and Industry Sectors at the Edge – The focus on solutions tailored to customer needs is driving opportunities from the creation of new businesses to the birth of new trillion-dollar industry sectors.

Call to Action

The opportunity at the Edge represents a new way of conceiving business – designing from the outside in and putting the organization’s focus on what happens at the edge to maximize value for customers and employees, while also driving operational efficiency. Although it may seem that the concept is in its infancy, the nature of competition and the exponential rate of advancement in the underlying technologies mean that the pace of adoption will accelerate. This will lead in turn to transformational shifts in the experiences created and the business and revenue models adopted across every sector. For the C-suite, the call to action is clear. The only question is: how quickly can you respond to start building the future?

Anyone paying attention to the speed at which networks have been evolving must also understand the impact these changes have had on cybersecurity. Gone are the days when you could just place a firewall at the edge of your network and call it good. Today, security needs to be everywhere, at every edge, following every user, and tracking and securing every application and workflow end-to-end—especially as they move across and between different network environments.

The challenge for CISOs is that few security solutions are up to the task. Even those that claim to be “network-aware” do not provide the depth of integration or broad deployability that organizations require. In addition, every bit of the network, even those segments in a constant state of change, that is not covered by a centrally managed and deeply integrated policy represents a blind spot in your protection – and an opportunity for cybercriminals to worm their way into your network. Building an effective security strategy for today’s digital organizations requires three key components.

Network and Security Convergence

Converging security and the network is more than just a marketing catchphrase. A Security-driven Networking strategy places security front and center in every network decision, ensuring that nothing in the network ever changes, not even optimizing a connection, without appropriate protections in place. But that’s just the start. True convergence also means that security and the network teams work together to address critical issues they couldn’t solve independently. Automatically segmenting and monitoring IoT devices, maintaining zero trust policies for accessing the network or applications, or consistently enforcing policies for applications and workflows that flow across and between multiple clouds and physical network environments require the network and security to work together as a unified solution. Such an approach is the heart and soul of any scalable work-from-anywhere strategy that is serious about extending enterprise-grade protection to home offices and mobile users and devices.

Security Consolidation

Consolidating security solutions using a platform-based strategy expands visibility and enables true automation that can span the network. It allows AI-powered technologies and services to span the network rather than be limited to a tiny subset of solutions. A platform built around a common OS helps eliminate conflicts and user error when configuring and orchestrating diverse solutions—especially those deployed at different edges of the network. But not any platform-based solution can do this. An effective platform not only needs to be deployed natively in any environment but also seamlessly translate policies between those ecosystems. This is the only way to ensure consistent enforcement and monitor and secure applications, transactions, and workflows that cross between different environments.

Multi-vendor, best-of-breed strategies require staffing, investments and resources to effectively integrate and managed multiple products—the very same limitations that stymie efforts to close gaps in visibility and control. The practical result is vendor lock-in due to lack of skilled staff and increased complexity as teams struggle to integrate multiple products from different vendors. Therefore, any platform candidate must be built using open APIs and common standards so that third-party solutions can be easily integrated, giving IT teams the best of both worlds. Also look for vendors with large, open and mature DevOps communities that reduce the challenges of third-party technology integration.

Exceptional Performance

An effective security platform needs to do its job without bottlenecking traffic or bogging things down. However, that is precisely what many security solutions do when it comes to table-stakes functions like inspecting encrypted traffic. According to Google, over 95% of internet traffic is encrypted. Yet most firewall performance drops precipitously when tasked with inspecting that traffic. It’s because they were built with off-the-shelf CPUs that were never designed to support such processor-intensive tasks. Like the graphics processors that allow users to stream video conferencing in real-time, security tools need specialized hardware that can offload critical security functions, so organizations never have to choose between security and performance.

Digital Acceleration Must Be Secure to Avoid Deceleration

It’s a new world, and businesses that learn how to securely operate in this new environment have no limits on what is possible. However, that can only happen if they take the same digital acceleration principles they are using for their network and apply them to security. So, consider starting with security solutions designed to support the way you operate the rest of your business.

The strategic DVDC practice area within Deloitte will provide advanced software engineering and multi-cloud services capabilities to clients to accelerate product velocity, enabled across distributed cloud environments. Deloitte and VMware will help clients pivot to modern software engineering by enhancing developer experience and enabling tools and services to deliver more efficient and effective development and delivery of products and applications. VMware Cross-Cloud services, particularly VMware Tanzu, will provide a modern cloud-native apps platform in an ecosystem strategy that enables Deloitte to deliver apps to production faster and more securely across industries such as retail, public sector, health care, financial services and automotive.

“The Deloitte VMware Distributed Cloud practice will focus on transforming our client’s technology to become an innovation enabler,” said Ranjit Bawa, principal and U.S. cloud leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Zia Yusuf, senior vice president of strategic ecosystem and industry solutions, VMware, said, “as exemplified by being a multi-year VMware Partner Achievement award winner, it’s clear that VMware and Deloitte are fully aligned on our commitment to delivering outcomes as a service to our mutual clients.”