A digital perfect storm is brewing

Remote access with the work from home/work from anywhere model skyrocketing makes a high-quality user experience essential.

• 58% of office workers anticipate that they will work eight or more days each month from home.¹
• 15-20% of employees worked from a remote location prior to the global pandemic.²

Wi-Fi 6 and 5G deliver higher-speed connectivity and better performance, with virtual reality and Internet of Things (IoT) applications benefiting in particular.

• 575Mbps: the average speed delivered by a 5G connection by 2023.
• 92Mbps: the average speed delivered by Wi-Fi by 2023.³

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have seen a significant boost from employees working from home.

• 18% SaaS growth annually in the next 5 years.⁴

Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technology enables admins to make network-wide changes in hours, whereas an average of four months is needed to make changes on a typical enterprise legacy WAN.

• $14.9B: the value of the SD-WAN market in 2023, up from $4B in 2019.⁵

The IoT experience enables people to interact with things and vice versa, creating a wide range of new use cases.

• 50% of all global networked devices will be IoT devices by 2023.
• 19% growth in number of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections annually.
• 10% growth annually in number of devices and connections versus population growth of 1% annually and 6% growth annually in the number of Internet users.⁶

Competitive advantage today is based on being able to make the best decisions as quickly as possible. AI algorithms can draw key insights from data faster than humans can.

• 515% increase in the number of anomalies detected by ITOps teams using Cisco AppDynamics AI/ML-based Cognition Engine between May and August 2020 as they scaled application and infrastructure capacity to meet remote workforce demands.⁷
• The Cognition Engine learns application-usage patterns to isolate anomalies and allows IT teams to be aware of issues and fix them faster.