When we launched Cisco Annual Internet Report earlier this year, there was no visibility into the new trends that were going to be unleashed by the pandemic globally just a month later.  While the rampant spread of COVID19 has created some new trends there are a number of findings from the Internet report that are still likely to bear out.

Let's look at what is still relevant and what are the new trends.

We feel that the top-line global projections regarding the number of Internet users reaching 5.3 billion by 2023 - 66 percent of the global population, and the average fixed broadband speed reaching 110 Mbps will still hold true. While the device mix might change a little bit -with a 1% to 2% growth in PCs that were earlier seeing a decline -we still expect to see nearly 4 devices and connections per capita globally by 2023.

So, what is new? As the pandemic spread across the world, work from home ramped up even as on-campus presence plummeted. According to data from the Cisco Umbrella security platform, the number of remote workers doubled globally in a two-week period at the beginning of March.

Almost overnight, IT teams found themselves facing the daunting task of supporting this newly remote workforce, the additional traffic they would generate, and the applications they would need to perform flawlessly and securely as they moved from in-person to online experiences.

Comparing data from 2019 to the first half of 2020, we've also seen a growth across all categories of malware, phishing, cryptomining, and trojans, with the largest increase being in malicious phishing sites preying on people's fears around the virus. Visibility into these trends is important for IT teams to adapt to changing patterns and be able to "predict and prevent."

In addition, Cisco's ThousandEyes platform saw global network outages, including the Inernet and cloud, increased 63% in March over January levels.  In this remote/hybrid workforce environment, the Internet has become an extension of enterprise networks and the enterprise core. That makes having visibility into that core essential in order to ensure secure SD access and business resiliency.

At the heart of IT agility today is a growing need to have visibility and insights into these trends, and into how the network is performing, in order to take the right action - to attain business resiliency and deliver the best possible user and application experience.

Dive into the Cisco Annual Internet Report.

Read post 2 in the series: Insights in a Multicloud World.