Will small business network switches be eliminated due to cloud networking? The following case study could provide an insight on the same.
ABC limited , a small business organization with 300 users had their internal servers in house. They had 4 servers, for Sales, Development, HR, Finance. All the servers were setup in their office and managed by local network engineers. The departments were segregated using VLAN technology on switches with appropriate access control. The users in the company had a combination of desktops and servers each of which is connected either to respective switch ports or wireless access points.
With the advent of cloud, ABC limited is now planning to move their servers to the cloud infrastructure. Once the servers are moved to the cloud, they are allowing 80 % of their workforce to work from home and move to a smaller office.
So the question is, what happens to the network switches ? How will the new network infrastructure look like ?
The local network at the smaller office need not have a switch at all . The smaller office can be setup with high speed Wifi mesh routers. The latest Wifi 6 mesh routers supports upto 150 users per device. Wifi adapters can be purchased and setup on the desktops which need access.
This totally eliminates the need of switches in the infrastructure as well as cabling. The desktops can access the servers on the cloud through the Wifi routers. The home workforce can access the cloud servers directly through internet at home.
As more and more companies are migrating to the cloud, and offices becoming a tradition of the past (May be), one could imagine the future of small business network switches, if the work from home culture is going to become a norm.