Not to state the obvious, all of us have been affected by COVID and the globally-instituted quarantine mandates. It wasn’t just business professionals who had to adjust to Work-From-Home. Students and teachers now had to interact virtually, retired citizens now had to access essential needs differently, and friends and family now had to socialize in a completely new way.

Gartner recently released a new Magic Quadrant for SSE – Security Service Edge for 2022 in addition to the Critical Capabilities Guide for SSE. Yes, it’s SSE and it’s not a typo – we didn’t forget the “A”. So, what about SASE – and why the need for another IT acronym? While the differences in the two may seem subtle, the application of technologies that fall into this space are distinct with the COVID Pandemic serving as the backdrop and impetus for the need in re-classification.

A couple of years ago, our family moved to a new home. To no surprise, the simple act of having to pack up belongings and move them to the new house forced us to get rid of all the junk. Two years later, we have accumulated a lot more junk in our house, yet the annual process of purging has not yielded nearly as much clean-up as that single move. This is the essence of “Move to Improve” – the rationalization method that accelerated during COVID. For many organizations that were paralyzed and as an effect had not modernized their virtual environments, a simple move to the cloud via VMC allowed a quick way to get out of the technology debt that accumulated over the course of years. Without the lingering technical baggage, the move to modernize workloads to cloud-native became much easier. Moving and then improving helped accelerate digital initiatives like workload portability (deploying Kubernetes and container strategies) as well as OS and DB migrations to Linux and RDS, respectively.

It is generally agreed that workloads are what determine the resourcing options. Anytime we typically hear about the “repatriation of workloads” from the cloud back to on-premise deployments, it is typically a consequence of not properly rationalizing the best migration option for said workload. And as expected, the workloads that migrate first and remained in the cloud were those around re-factoring/re-engineering of applications, or re-purchasing through SaaS delivery options.

In part 1 of this blog, we focused on client survey research and industry analysis to explore the changing technology approaches to IT modernization. Traditional IT approaches are too complicated, require too much upfront information, take too long to design and deploy. They also lack intuitiveness, requiring a learning curve for the end-user to adopt and become proficient. Consumerism stresses traditional IT approaches.There is a reason why new technology approaches bear names like LEAN, Agile, Kanban, sprints, and the like – it’s about SPEED.