Why networking is core to digital transformation success
Despite the challenging market conditions, digital transformation remains a very hot topic among technology leaders and executives. As a recent McKinsey report states: "The challenging economic outlook and continued uncertainty are forcing CEOs to contemplate some difficult choices. Some are pulling in, making cuts, and focusing on riding out the storm. Others, however, are taking decisive action to make sure that when the crisis ends, they'll be stronger than they are today.
"One key lesson from that experience is the companies that move early and decisively in a crisis do best."
And so, technology leaders across all industries and sectors are driving the digital transformation of their business, which is causing leaders to rethink how they measure the advancement of their data center and cloud infrastructure. To do that, they need to keep a close eye on networking and security. Juniper Networks is proving to be instrumental in helping its customers modernise their data centers with broad security and networking portfolio engineered with automation and visibility to ease operations.
One of the biggest concerns that organisations face with the network is the need to shift to remote work -- and that shift will become a "new normal." Gartner predicts that "74% of companies plan to permanently shift to more remote work post-COVID-19." (1) With this comes the question of how organisations enable access to data and systems for remote workers without compromising the integrity of the overall network.
Recently, Gartner's 2020 Magic Quadrant for Datacenter and Cloud Networking (2) has recognised Juniper as a leader in the space. This is the third time in a row that it has done so, with this recognition being the product of Juniper's proven strengths in helping customers to simplify operations with automated fabrics, AI-driven insights, and built-in security. Built on a common operating system and instrumented to be AI-driven, Juniper's solutions let customers apply consistent, end-to-end policies wherever their applications and data reside.
Juniper has been also named a leader -- for the second time -- in the Forrester Wave™: Open, Programmable Switches for a Businesswide SDN. Forrester's evaluation places Juniper as a leader with high scores around our overall market presence, strategy, and operating system. Forrester positions Juniper as the best vendor for customers who want to "automate the entire network with a consistent OS, from the data center to the business edge."
Juniper is recognised in both reports.
There is a great deal of innovation coming to the networking space. Automation, AI, and machine learning are all going to become exponentially more critical as 5G and Wi-Fi 6 become more standardised, delivering an order of magnitude more bandwidth for organisations to leverage. As the bedrock on which these solutions will be delivered, there is a lot of room for organisations to take a leadership position through networking.
In other words, the space is ripe for innovation, assuming that an organisation can find the right partner. As the Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Datacenter and Cloud Networking report states: "Historically, the data center network was just a fast, scalable LAN that connected all data centere equipment, mainly servers. Although high-speed Ethernet ports (10/25/50/100GbE) are still important, the market extends far beyond just the hardware 'speeds and feeds' affiliated with switches and switch ports.
"Specifically, as many enterprises are building private clouds and/or cloud-inspired data centers, they need improved programmability, automation, orchestration and integration with the rest of the data center infrastructure."
The Juniper team has said it thrives on the successes of its customers, who are the strength behind these recognitions. Juniper has measurable use cases across almost every vertical including finance, healthcare, and government. Find out more about how Juniper is helping its customers in the data center and cloud.
Learn how Juniper maintains its position as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for the third consecutive year by downloading a complimentary copy of the Gartner's 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking.
(1) Gartner Press Release, Gartner CFO Survey Reveals 74% Intend to Shift Some Employees to Remote Work Permanently, 3 April 2020.
(2) Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Center and Cloud Networking, Andrew Lerner, Evan Zeng, Jonathan Forest, 30 June 2020.
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