Two forces dismantled the assumptions underneath the traditional enterprise. Both are now well documented.
The data center left the building
The single biggest change is that the workloads moved to the cloud. According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud report, more than half of enterprise workloads now run in public cloud, roughly 54 percent and rising, with hybrid cloud the dominant operating model for around 70 percent of organizations.
The applications followed the same path. Core business software is now SaaS by default. Microsoft 365 alone is used by millions of companies worldwide across hundreds of millions of paid seats, and the large majority of businesses now run their CRM in the cloud rather than on a server in the building.
This guts the original case for the on-premise Layer 3 core. The heavy east-west traffic that justified a high-capacity routing core, server talking to server inside the building, largely left when the servers did. When your email, your files, your CRM, and your line-of-business applications all live in the cloud, the dominant traffic flow is no longer machine-to-machine across the LAN. It is user-to-cloud, out through the internet connection. The center of gravity moved from the core to the edge.
The workforce scattered
At the same time the data center was leaving, the people were too. Gallup’s data shows roughly half of remote-capable U.S. employees now work hybrid, with about a quarter fully remote. Hybrid has stabilized as the durable norm, not a temporary disruption.
The practical consequence for network design is a multiplication of edges. The old model had a few large sites. The new model has many small ones: home offices, branch locations, pop-up sites, and people working from anywhere on their own devices. BYOD is now near-universal, with over 80 percent of organizations permitting personal devices in some form.
A network built to serve one big building cannot serve a thousand small edges. The requirement inverts. The question is no longer “how powerful is the core?” It is “how reliably, securely, and manageably can I light up the next edge?”
From the Field: 2008, the day the math inverted.
West Networks principal Peter West has been building this architecture since before it had a name. In his words:
“In 2008 an environmental research company came to me in the middle of the financial crisis. They were scaling fast doing environmental impact studies for wind farms, capturing terabytes of video, image, and audio in the field and moving it over 3G cellular. I hold a patent on that transmission method. The traditional quote to build their infrastructure came in around two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Cisco, the works, and in that economy it would have killed the project.
I had been researching multi-WAN technology and found Peplink. I built the whole thing with two Peplink routers for about four thousand dollars and roughly twenty thousand in servers. Around twenty-five thousand dollars all in, against a quarter-million-dollar quote. It single-handedly saved the project’s ability to continue, and the company grew through the recession.
That was the day my sales pitch changed forever. For the first time in my career I could walk into a room and say: I can give you more performance and more reliability for less money. I had never been able to say that before. It changed how I saw the entire enterprise. And notice what that project actually was, it was not a building full of people. It was data pouring in from the edge, from the field, over cellular. I was living the edge-first enterprise before anyone had words for it.”
From the field — 2008, the day the math inverted
In 2008, during the financial crisis, an environmental research company came to us with a problem traditional enterprise networking could not solve economically. They were scaling rapidly, capturing terabytes of video, image, and audio data in the field for wind-farm environmental impact studies and moving that data over 3G cellular. The conventional quote to build the required infrastructure came in around $250,000 — in that economy, a number that would have killed the project.
We had been researching multi-WAN technology and found early Peplink equipment. Using two routers and roughly $20,000 in servers, the entire solution was built for about $25,000. Performance and reliability increased while cost collapsed by an order of magnitude. The project continued; the company grew through the recession.
Notice what the project actually was. It was not a building full of people with servers down the hall. It was data pouring in from the edge, over cellular, from the field. The New Enterprise did not begin as a theory. It began as a practical inversion of the old math — visible in 2008, while the rest of the industry is still catching up.