The global pandemic that continues to lay waste to economies, bring life to a standstill, and has claimed the lives of nearly 81,000 people to date around the globe, is emphasizing the importance of network architecture and performance.

“There’s a lot of innovation going on from a networking point of view as far as how the IT teams are dealing with this crisis,” Scott Harrell, SVP and GM of Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group, said during a conference call with analysts today.

IT professionals are meeting the need, but rapid changes in user behavior and shifting resources are also highlighting the opportunities that 5G and WiFi 6 will unlock for enterprises, he said.

“This is a huge innovation cycle we have to go through,” Harrell explained. “But just doing it from a hardware point of view won’t be enough. We’ve also got to become more flexible to be able to deal with things like COVID-19 but also just to deal with the changes in user behavior because … the users, and devices, and applications are becoming more dynamic.”

Enterprises “need to have high levels of automation, they need to start applying the analytics in that environment in a much different way than they’ve ever done before,” he said. “This is actually, I think, shaping up to be a golden age for wireless” with WiFi and cellular-based technologies playing important roles.

While 5G will play an integral role in enterprise networks for mission-critical applications, WiFi 6 will be “more important inside the walls of the enterprise,” Harrell said. The next-generation in WiFi technology can preserve and give proper priority to critical assets, and handle density much more effectively than the previous generation, he explained.

“The future of enterprise networks is a wireless-first world,” Harrell said. However, as everything shifts to wireless connectivity, access points are no longer enough to handle the increased load, he explained. “You have to build a very sophisticated layer of automation and analytics so they can be easily managed.”

This is where intent-based networking, a technology he described as a “huge shift in how you build and operate networks for enterprises,” comes into play. Earlier this year, Cisco added new network insight capabilities to its data center portfolio to bolster its vision of making networking operations proactive rather than reactive.

The technology, which makes use of machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and automation in the context of networking is just getting started, according to Harrell. “The network itself now has to become much more dynamic, much more flexible, and much more available. And this requires a shift in how you approach because most IT teams are not getting bigger. In fact, many are getting smaller.” he said.

“It’s about going from managing a box at a time to managing the entire fabric at a time. So instead of just managing one box, I’m managing the entire network,” Harrell said. Once an enterprise embraces a fabric architecture and layers in analytics, IT professionals can start doing more sophisticated things like network segmentation, he added.

These measures will become even more important as network operators and enterprises manage unprecedented spikes in demand. Cisco Webex experienced a 250% surge in usage last month in the United States, logging more than 14 billion meeting minutes and 324 million attendees, according to Harrell.