Understanding the evolution of the modern enterprise and its workforce

In this section, we will learn how the modern enterprise has slowly moved away from a central data center or headquarters model to a more distributed, internet-based model. We will also learn how the working habits of the enterprise workforce have changed with the advent of working remotely over the internet.

Evolution of the workforce

With the advent of the internet, for many technology workers, what could be done in the office can now be done remotely over the internet using technologies such as VPNs. This shift was accelerated due to several reasons:

• Employees want a flexible work style. They no longer are tied to a traditional 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. work schedule.
• Various teams in the companies now make up employees from different geographies, so 8 A.M. is no longer the same for everyone on the team.
• Companies benefited by moving from a dedicated office space (such as a cubicle for an employee and an office room for a manager) to a flexible workspace. This way, there are some flexible workspaces that could be reserved by the employees on the days where they want to come to the office.
• Different roles for the employees mean that someone could be working on a production install after-hours, which is better from the comfort of their home than a lonely work location with no one around.
• With the COVID-19 pandemic raging across the world, employees do not want to put their families at risk, and the pandemic has accelerated the move to work remotely over the internet.

All these points mean that now, companies must adapt to their workforce. They must make applications readily available to their employees wherever they are located.

Enterprise infrastructure evolution

In a data center architecture, the enterprise chooses certain locations to serve as their repositories for applications and data. A company may choose a certain city on each of the continents they operate in and provision and maintain a massive data center. At this point, the company needs to provision expensive private connections between all its offices and these data centers.

Very quickly, this becomes an expensive proposition for the company. Not only does it have to focus on its core business, but now it must run and maintain its massive infrastructure. This infrastructure consists of several product categories, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and application servers. For redundancy and high-availability purposes, the company must invest double the amount of equipment, even if the chances of a failure on the hardware components is low. This is because it cannot take the risk of business application downtime.

To add to this complexity, we all know that hardware for these products quickly becomes out of date. We are all familiar with our own personal upgrade cycles where we upgrade our electronic gadgets such as our smartphones, laptops, and tablets. Corporations are in a similar upgrade situation every 3 to 5 years based on the manufacturer, the product, and the technological changes in the marketplace.

When these upgrades come around, there is a wholesale lift-and-shift of the entire hardware, which needs a lot of manpower. This upgrade is also treated as a capital expense (CAPEX) and not as an operating expense (OPEX). Enterprises prefer an OPEX model because it allows them to predict the costs and account for them in their business operating model.

Enterprises also have a range of products doing different things. Most of the time, they do not have a choice, even if one product overlaps with another product in terms of its features. There is no single magic bullet or integrated product that can meet all the customers' needs.

Now that we've learned about the evolution of the preferences of the enterprise workforce and the changing requirements for the enterprise infrastructure, let's look at how a cloud-based security solution can address both those needs.