Author: Rose de Fremery
Date published: February 6, 2025
Businesses seeking a competitive edge in an increasingly challenging and unpredictable market landscape are digitally transforming at breakneck speed. With corporate networks expanding to include many endpoints and devices across multiple locations, companies increasingly realize that they need resilient networks to compete and thrive in this new world. Here are a few concepts that business leaders need to know about network resilience, why it matters and how they can achieve it.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines network resilience as "a computing infrastructure that provides continuous business operation (i.e., highly resistant to disruption and able to operate in a degraded mode if damaged), rapid recovery if failure does occur, and the ability to scale to meet rapid or unpredictable demands." What that means is a network that is resilient by design, secure and highly available. Resilient networks can intelligently handle a variety of challenges including but not limited to configuration issues, cyber-attacks, unexpected emergencies and extreme weather events.
Network resilience supports critical business continuity, allowing a company to continue to operate even with circumstances that would otherwise cause costly disruptions to its daily operations or even threaten the viability of the business itself. Because resilient networks are designed to recover from these incidents on their own whenever possible, they enable lean IT teams to ensure a higher standard of performance and better security even in dynamic and rapidly changing business environments.
Having needed to quickly pivot to a work-from-home model during the pandemic, many businesses now recognize the importance of a resilient and agile network infrastructure that can adapt to radically different business requirements in a short time frame. Cybersecurity is also an increasingly urgent priority to these businesses now that remote work is more commonplace and the number of endpoints that cyber attackers can target has vastly expanded.
In an era of shifting market conditions and continuous digital transformation, network resilience can give businesses the stability and flexibility they require to achieve their goals—no matter what unexpected developments they may face. This essential business capability can allow businesses to successfully compete and thrive, regardless of their location or industry.
Resilient networks can intelligently adapt during a disruption, maintaining essential business connectivity even when there is an issue that could otherwise affect normal operations. For example, software-defined wide area networks (SD WAN) can be configured to automatically route essential network traffic over an alternate connection that has capacity if the main connection becomes unavailable, unstable or unreliable. End users may never even know that this has happened, so they can often continue working as usual while the IT team addresses the root cause behind the scenes. This approach not only can help ensure maximum uptime for a business that cannot afford to be disconnected from its customers, but it also gives IT more breathing room to troubleshoot network performance issues without worrying about an outage affecting the company’s productivity.
Network resilience is not the same thing as network redundancy, which is a related but separate concept. According to Gartner®, network redundancy is "a communications pathway that has additional links to connect all nodes in case one link goes down."1 When a business opts for a redundant network infrastructure, it typically installs and maintains two sets of the exact same network components. If one fails, stops performing correctly or becomes unavailable for some reason, there should be a backup ready to take its place on a moment's notice. These components can be configured to respond automatically or manually, depending on the situation.
Businesses that require a high standard of network performance have traditionally invested in redundant networks to guarantee a precise level of uptime. However, network redundancy often requires significant capital expenditures, to say nothing of the duplicate licensing agreements and administrative overhead that are involved. It is also logistically challenging to create a redundant network infrastructure in today's work-from-anywhere world, in which the corporate network extends far beyond the data center to encompass an entire constellation of home offices and mobile devices. For these reasons, businesses are beginning to consider newer and more cost-effective alternatives such as resilient networks.
Businesses now have powerful solutions to enable network resilience. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) is a network architecture framework that combines cloud security technologies with Software Defined Wide Area Network (SD WAN) services to help provide agile and resilient network operations across the entire business. SASE can give businesses a universally distributed, identity-centric networking and security platform that can ensure end users and devices are securely connected across all locations. It is adaptable and flexible enough to manage a wide range of distributed environments, including traditional on-premises architecture, hybrid cloud scenarios, edge computing, and of course, hybrid or remote workforce settings.
Perhaps most importantly, businesses can use this technology framework to help achieve centralized, simplified security across all their endpoints. SASE can ensure the company is protected from internet threats, it can enforce its internet policies, and it can achieve data loss prevention across all locations and devices. With this kind of network resilience, businesses can continue innovating at the speed required in today's dynamic market environment.
In today's era of constant digital transformation and remote work, achieving network resilience is a complex endeavor. Without the right approach, many businesses may find themselves struggling to maintain proper security across all their devices and locations. In turn, this obstacle can compromise their stability over the long run. Effective frameworks such as SASE can help companies overcome this increasingly urgent challenge, so they can return their focus to what matters most—growing the business.
Discover how Verizon's Secure Access Service Edge solutions can adaptively secure end users and devices across locations.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.
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