Most of us have heard about Zoom trolling. People who enter an unsecured meeting or event and disrupt it in various ways are exposing some of the downsides to the new normal of remote work or education. The disruption can not only be embarrassing for the organizers but also expose a company’s trade secrets and intellectual knowledge to competitors, along with even greater security issues.
There is a new movement happening around the professionalization of remote work. Something we may have seen evolve is that news organizations have slowly encouraged their reporters and newscasters to use professional backgrounds, regardless of where their “studio” is. “Joe” in the corner of his kitchen doing the weather does not cut it anymore. And it also involves getting serious about ensuring that internal meetings and events are served with the level of security commensurate with the need. Imagine the executives of companies developing new products holding unsecure Zoom meetings. It is a recipe for disaster if you are not professionalizing your approach to remote “everything”.
This post is spotlighting NetFoundry as one of the leaders for orchestrating remote-worker zero trust networking, among other services they provide. According to a NetFoundry customer from their website, “working with NetFoundry Zero Trust enables us to best serve edge compute. We have been working to embed our IoT Edge solution with NetFoundry SDKs to enable customers to meet their edge compute goals without the hassle of deploying VPNs, firewall, or propriety hardware.” With their SDN (Software Defined Network) with zero trust networking services, NetFoundry can help their clients quickly spin up a high-performance private network without putting up locally configured VPNs. The scale potential for remote meetings is tremendous but equally important is the level of confidence needed in the security capabilities of the network.
From NetFoundry: https://netfoundry.io/edge-networking/
Let’s highlight the meetings and events business as an example of an industry hit very hard by COVID-19 and how they might address this as an opportunity. In San Francisco, along with the rest of the world, the physical event business has been decimated. One of Fortress Data Center’s clients is building a next generation platform that can bring this business back as a digital twin to the physical event. Even as people start traveling again, the need for a digital twin is critical since it protects and expands the market for events. From Wikipedia, a digital twin “refers to a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets (physical twin), processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes.”
For instance, J.P. Morgan will potentially hold its 39th Annual Healthcare Conference at the Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco in January 2021. In January 2020, according to their website, over 9,000 attendees from more that 450 private and public companies attended. For 2021, it appears they are still planning to hold the conference and expecting even more participants. What happens if a resurgence of the COVID-19 virus happens in late fall and they are not ready for a digital twin? The hotels lose out, the city of San Francisco loses out and the attendees are faced with missing the knowledge transfer and networking that they are there for.
A solution is to prepare for inevitable disruption and use the opportunity to reach more people on a global basis with a quality and immersive experience. With NetFoundry’s capabilities tied into the Fortress Data Centers’ San Francisco location, everything can start locally and then go global through the cloud with low latency and high connection speeds. Since Fortress Data Centers are at the center of a cross connected environment of carrier neutral 5G and Edge Computing, the digital twin of the Westin St. Francis can be rendered in near real time with aspects of virtual and augmented reality to support video feeds happening in the venue. The hotel becomes a destination for virtual attendees and travelers from all over the world which expands the reach and drives revenue for the Westin, City of San Francisco and other providers of event and experience services. Now magnify this by every venue in the Bay area and we have a new paradigm of how conferences are done.
From NetFoundry: https://netfoundry.io/replace-vpn-with-zero-trust/
This is just one example of how the landscape has changed and why having an SDN capability to support the hybrid server needs of every physical and virtual business needs to change as well. NetFoundry is bringing the new capabilities needed for all business to consider and Fortress Data Centers is prepared to set the standard for excellence in helping achieve the best local-to-global has to offer.