When COVID-19 first hit in early 2020, many enterprises thought the abrupt change to remote work would be temporary. But as October begins, things are still looking as if everyone will be working and living in a digital world for a lot longer than anyone might have expected.

Many schools are online, and a lot of people are still working from home. So how have technology companies been adapting to this huge move into the online world, and how is automation helping navigate this significant change?

“We all appreciate the network much more than we used to do before,” said Thomas Scheibe (pictured), vice president of product management for data center at Cisco Systems Inc. “[The] network becomes much more obvious as a critical piece. And so, before, we really talked a lot about agility and flexibility; these days we talk much more about resiliency.”

Scheibe spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Cisco’s Accelerating Automation With DevNet special event. They discussed the resiliency of the network and how automation plays into the digital transformation in 2020. (* Disclosure below.)

Resiliency for a network’s flexibility and automation

Resiliency of a company’s network is crucial to being able to endure such unprecedented times as COVID-19, according to Scheibe. One of the ways to achieve resiliency is distributed data centers that have the ability to move a company’s workloads and access for users to wherever they want to be. Networking within a hybrid cloud or multicloud environment helps enable inner data center resiliency.

“[It’s] really the ability to have the flexibility to move your workloads where you want them to be,” Scheibe said. “And there are different reasons why you want to place them, right? You might’ve placed them for security reason. You might place some for compliance reasons depending on which customer segment you’re after. And so I think in the end what an enterprise looks for is that agility, flexibility and resiliency.”

As to automation, Cisco has been putting cloud-ready infrastructure into its products over the past five to six years, and application programming interfaces are everywhere. Whether they are on the box, on the controller or on the operations tools, all of these assets are API enabled.

“That’s just the foundation for automation,” Scheibe said. “The next step really is what do you do with that capability? And this is the integration with a lot of automation tools. This is where the IT operation transformation kicks in for different customers at different speed.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE