California based Juniper Networks offers high-end network solutions to help service providers, enterprises & the public sector create value & accelerate business, have come up with their Technology predictions and Cyber Security risks for 2017.
Networking
According to a new IDC report, the networking market in India grew at 10.5 percent during the Q2 of 2016 as compared to last year. Banks upgrading its networks and spends increasing from automobile, education and professional services organizations were the key reasons behind the growth of switching market in this quarter, as per the report.
Network Virtualization. With the success of early NFV deployments and the continuing challenges for operators to deliver even more services with flawless performance, end customers will require new levels of flexibility. As such, there will be a push towards bring your own license (BYOL) and pay as you go models tailored to supporting cloud-based infrastructures for different application needs.
IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a unique domain that offers tremendous business opportunities for telecom players in the years to come. Studies show by 2020, over 25 billion connected devices will be live globally, with opportunities in abundance for data mining and data analytics. The total revenue generated from IoT industry would be USD 300 billion and India would have a share of 5-6% of the global IoT industry.
We see IoT getting early roll out in surveillance projects, vehicle tracking, connected cars, and home automation. We see consumer domain having the maximum uptake. In fact, out of 6B+ devices, close to 4B is in the consumer domain and the rest in business solutions.
IoT Under Pressure. Today, IoT is letting us down, underperforming and under delivering. In fact, in some ways it’s making life more complex and less secure as it’s quickly becoming the gateway to cyber-attacks. Although consumer adoption of IoT is still in its early stages, there are very few turnkey orchestration tools to successfully manage IoT security. For IoT to survive and live up to what it promises, it’s vital that technology companies master security and unlock the possibilities of integration. The real “winners” are going to be companies who can code their own solutions to ensure their products are secure.
SDN
Given the exponential growth of the telecom space, connectivity spreading across the devices and Internet of Things (IoT) is likely to add more connected data sources and enterprises will have to take this increase of data traffic into consideration. Two objectives which would emerge & shape plans of 2017 Enterprises & in turn Telecom offerings in India are:
a. Optimizing cost performance on an exponential scale for infrastructure investments.
b. Building out an agile infrastructure, to solve the future aspirations of enterprises which might still be currently unknown.
Most industry experts believe that enterprise networks in the future will be a combination of SDN and traditional networks and that SDN can deliver benefits if implemented well with the right infrastructure.
Cyber security
We will see an increase in the collaborative security industry. The security industry is slowly working towards collaboration between adversaries, but at the end of the day, collaboration remains nascent. Beyond sharing basic data, we still lack the interoperability necessary to address the next generation of threats. This has led to an increase in cybersecurity startups finding favor among funders – venture capital investments in cybersecurity startups went from less than $1 billion in 2010 to $2.5 billion in 2014. A recent study from SANS Institute found that 71 percent of respondents said access to shared threat intelligence gave them improved visibility into threats, while only 40 percent are actively contributing to threat intelligence. This disconnect indicates that all security organizations need to be working together and sharing open threat intelligence, which is crucial for the industry to remain one step ahead of attackers.
Automation will help organizations address the shortage of security personnel. Often organizations invest heavily in effective security hardware and software, but lack the security specialists necessary to ensure their effectiveness. As an example, breaches like the ones that impacted Target and Home Depot were detected by their high-end security systems, but the security operations practitioners were too overwhelmed by the thousands of alerts they received per hour to see which ones posed the most imminent threat. As automation becomes more integrated into security solutions, security personnel will receive fewer notifications with more relevance, relieving them of the manual task of hunting through a sea of alerts to find the truly malicious ones.
Cyber attackers will expand their horizons to smaller targets. While hackers have traditionally targeted enterprises with large amounts of data and deep pockets, we will start to see attackers focusing more on smaller businesses who are potentially easier targets. While these SMBs may not have as much for attackers to gain, they are viewed as softer, easier marks good for making quick money, which can be devastating and possibly bankrupting to small organizations. As large enterprises ramp up their security, expect to see SMBs more frequently targeted by hackers.
The inputs are collaboratively shared by Sajan Paul, director of systems engineering & CTO at Juniper Networks in India and SAARC; Rakesh Kumar Singh, tech lead – Data Center at Juniper Networks; and Pankaj Kitchlu, service provider systems engineering leader, India & SAARC at Juniper Networks.
