The Record - Issue 18: Autumn 2020

87 This is one example where public cloud can be leveraged to expand remote access capacity. An on-premises firewall or VPN gateway may not be sized to provide remote access to the entire employee population now working from home, and it may be a complicated and lengthy process to expand that capacity. A quicker option is to stand up a remote access service in public cloud and connect it back to the on-premises firewall. This solution can be acquired from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go basis, for example, and set up within hours. All remote workers are given a new website to connect, and VPN and security processing are offloaded to the cloud. The entire system can be quickly and eas- ily scaled up when shelter-in-place restrictions go into effect and scaled down when employees go back to working in the office. Remote access is, of course, just one example of the fact that traditional network and secu- rity infrastructures are inflexible – they cannot effectively accommodate digital transformation requirements. The health crisis just brought this into the spotlight. The move to public cloud is already broadly underway, and networks need to catch up. In our Future shock: the cloud is the new network report, Barracuda surveyed 750 IT decision makers responsible for their organi- sations’ cloud infrastructure. We learned that organisations are well on their way to moving their infrastructure to public cloud, with 45 per cent of IT infrastructure already running in the cloud today and rising to an estimated 76 per cent in five years. At the same time, companies need to re-evaluate their security strategies as they move to public cloud, with 70 per cent of respondents indicating that security concerns restrict their organisations’ adoption of public cloud. And their solution of choice for optimis- ing and securing access to public cloud is a fully integrated secure SD-WAN, with 56 per cent of respondents having already deployed or are in the process of deploying it. Mike Goldgof is senior director of product marketing for Barracuda Networks