The Power of Modern Networking Technology
As organizations adopt these powerful new networking technologies, they should expect to see significant benefits, including improved performance. For example, the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing access (OFDMA) feature of Wi-Fi 6 allows multiple clients to communicate with a single access point simultaneously, resulting in greater efficiency and higher throughput.
Cloud-managed networks also provide administrators with a clearer look into the networks they’re overseeing. In years past, admins would respond to user complaints as a key indicator of poor network performance, but advanced network technologies can automatically detect performance issues — and even fix them — before humans realize a problem exists.
“The vast majority of organizations don't have tools to be able to know what's actually going on on their networks,” Pratt says. “That's something that new networking technology has been bringing to the table over the last couple years.”
Along with visibility, these new network tools enable simpler, more direct management of enterprise networks, powered by automation. Given that most network outages occur due to human error such as misconfigurations, automation can reduce these mistakes and improve reliability. Automated enforcement of security policies also minimizes the number of vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit.
“These tools are able to manage those distributed policies,” Rasmussen says. “They can maintain security controls and protections at scale, instead of individually configuring every single device.”