As the pandemic settles , small and medium-sized businesses are fighting to get back on their feet , aided by the new digital tools and processes that many have implemented this year . Oshadha Ranaweera , Manager for Connectivity Services WAN and ISP , Somerville , addresses this and talks to Intelligent SME . tech about how technology , such as SD-WAN , can improve Business Continuity for companies around the world .

MORE THAN TWO THIRDS

( 69 %) OF AUSTRALIAN AND

NEW ZEALAND

ORGANISATIONS ACCELERATED THEIR DIGITAL

TRANSFORMATION LAST YEAR .

S AUSTRALIA ’ S SMALL and

Staff now work remotely ; customers are preferring to transact online and supply chains face disruptions that will take many months to resolve . Welcome to the ‘ new normal ’.

As a result , traditional modes of operation need to evolve . On-premises IT infrastructures , secured by perimeter defences , are making way for distributed architectures comprising cloud-based services and high-speed network links .

This wave of change is already evident . More than two thirds ( 69 %) of Australian and New Zealand organisations accelerated their Digital Transformation last year , according to an IDC survey . Businesses increased their transformation expenditure accordingly , from 45 % of Information and Communications Technology ( ICT ) spending at the beginning of 2020 to 55 % in 2021 .

A high proportion of this investment is being targeted at cloud platforms , which have become a key tool for delivering new applications designed to be more customer-focused , easily accessible and rapidly upgradeable .

This , in turn , has shone a spotlight on networking . Businesses are realising the networking infrastructure now required is less like the hub-and-spoke configurations of yesteryear and more like a mesh of connections that connect remote workers with data centres and cloud resources .

The need for network resilience

To build these new resilient networks , businesses need to look beyond traditional factors such as bandwidth , contention ratios and wide-area network ( WAN ) topologies . Instead , they need to focus on providing robust , always-on connectivity between remote workers , on-premises resources and cloud platforms .

In many cases , this change in focus highlights the inadequacies of existing legacy networks that were designed for very different operating conditions . They might have highspeed connections between head office and hosted data centres however , when it comes to connecting remote staff , things slow down rapidly . Many are relying on variable-quality

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