By: Jacob Chacko Regional Business Head – Middle East, Saudi & South Africa (MESA) at HPE Aruba

With CES a staple in the tech calendar for as long as I can remember, January always heralds the launch of some of the best, and at times most bizarre, devices of the year. And despite its virtual setting, this year’s show has delivered no differently.

Indeed, products “on display” at the 2021 conference included a furry anxiety robot, a home gardening machine, and smart perfume – all of which are either already available to buy or reportedly will be later this year. Good news for all the consumers who are eager to take them home and plug them into their network.

Of course, normally this wouldn’t represent any kind of problem for business leads and their IT teams – you can watch the launches with curiosity and consider each device’s merits as a consumer would. Expect this isn’t a normal year – and now it very much could be a problem.

According to Trend Micro research, more than half (52%) of global remote workers have IoT devices connected to their home network, and at least 10% are using lesser-known brands. With many such devices – especially from smaller brands – having well-documented weaknesses such as unpatched firmware vulnerabilities and insecure logins, the security implications of your corporate devices now being connected to the same network and vice versa are significant.

While I am certainly not casting any aspersions on this specific crop of CES gadgets, as the lines between work and home networks continue to blur smart home devices and their apps could represent a major weak link in corporate cybersecurity chains.

So with home working likely to remain standard practice even after the vaccine rolls out, how can you ensure your business is secure no matter where, how and what employees connect to it? And perhaps more importantly, how can you do so in a way that protects employee productivity versus simply locking them out?

The way I see it, securing the new hybrid workplace has three core requirements:

Identification – the only way to police access to your corporate network is to know what devices are trying to connect to it (either by name or behaviour), who is operating them and how and why they need to connect. With these details to hand, and the right security solution in place, you can differentiate the type of access you grant according to device or user group – full access, access to certain resource only, no access at all.   

Visibility – of course, in order to identify and segment all the devices accessing it, the network must first be able to see them. But with networks now extending across home, branch and cloud environments the picture most companies have today is fragmented at best. And this is only likely to get worse when hybrid working has employees constantly moving in and out of the office. That is why unifying your network infrastructure to ensure a single-pane-of-glass view is such an important step. After all, you can have the smartest technologies running on your network, but if they aren’t seeing the full picture then they can’t function 100% effectively and you’re still leaving yourself open to dangers.  

Automation – even with all this visibility, the sheer volume of devices now connecting to the network makes manual intervention to enforce any access policies practically impossible. Many IoT devices are operating around the clock and have the potential to “go bad” at any time – regardless of whether it is during work hours or not.

With AI you can develop policies that leverage context, such as the user role, device type, and location to make quick, accurate and automated decisions about how to react to anything out of the ordinary. That means that when an IoT device joins a network or starts to act suspiciously, it can be automatically quarantined (to borrow a topical word), keeping the rest of your corporate traffic separate and secure.

As we head deeper into 2021, security requirements might be getting more sophisticated, but so are the solutions available to meet them. We know hybrid working is coming, so why not take the time now to get your security prepared for everything this will mean.

By setting up comprehensive visibility as an essential foundation, and then building machine learning and artificial intelligence on top your business can stay one step ahead of, and reduce, the threat of the home-connected IoT device – and much more besides.

By John Madisson, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet

Organizations have distributed data and workloads across both cloud environments and on-premises data centers. As a result, IT teams have to deploy, manage, and secure increasingly complex and hybrid networks. And even though many organizations have moved many of their workloads into the cloud, the majority of them still operate hybrid environments. 

Hybrid environments allow organizations to keep important data on-premises. This allows them to maintain full control over sensitive assets, while also taking full advantage of the scalability and agility the cloud provides. However, as organizations become more hybrid and distributed, their security needs to be able to span across all environments.  

As applications, resources, devices, and workers work from anywhere, networks need to be able to adapt in real time. Workflows now often span physical data centers as well as multiple cloud environments; applications follow users regardless of where they are connecting from or what device they are using; and data and other resources need to be securely accessed by any user on any device in any location. Security needs to be able to adapt and scale to meet these new requirements.

Five Essential Security Functions to Hybrid Networks

To properly protect and defend these hybrid environments, organizations should look for security solutions that provide the following critical functions: 

1. Broad: Security solutions need to support a distributed security model where the exact same security solutions can be deployed in any environment. 
2. Integrated: All of the various security solutions deployed across the network need to be able to see and work together as a single system to detect threats and respond to them in a coordinated fashion, regardless of where they occur. 
3. Fast: These security functions need to operate not just at the speed of business, but at the speed of threats as well. 
4. Automated: Anomalous and malicious behaviors need automated responses. 
5. Security-driven Networking: Security-driven Networking weaves security and networking into a single, integrated system. This enables them to establish and enforce zero-trust access, dynamic network segmentation, and unified enforcement anywhere, on any device, in any location, without introducing security gaps or performance lags.

Success Requires Networking and Security to Function as a Single Solution

The majority of today’s security solutions are simply not fast enough, nor smart or responsive enough, don’t operate in enough places, and can’t adapt as quickly as today’s business requires. This is especially true in multi-vendor environments with disparate security solutions that don’t integrate when deployed. This lack of integration makes it impossible for organizations to securely use the flexible network environments they need to compete effectively. 

Instead, these organizations need a security platform, like the Fortinet Security Fabric, designed to span, adapt to, and protect today’s dynamic environments. If they can’t, their business will not be able to keep up. And that is critical in today’s digital business environment, where the difference between success and failure can be measured in microseconds. 

By: Hasan Darwish, Regional Sales Manager for Gulf at A10 Networks

2020 has been a challenging year for the entire world. We predict the pandemic response in 2020 will have a lasting impact on how and where consumers and businesses will use networks services, how service providers will build out their networks and where they will invest in additional capacity. 

Here are a few predictions for 2021 for service providers:

Digital Transformation will Accelerate

The pandemic will erase years of resistance by late adopters, social institutions and businesses that previously hadn’t bought into the “digital transformation” argument. Forced to go “online or die” individuals and businesses have learned new skills, overcome technology limitations and forged new business models during 2020. These will continue in 2021 and will accelerate many technology transitions that service providers are conducting.

IPv6 will Finally Overtake IPv4

Hovering right around 33 percent for most of the year, according to Google, IPv6 will be used in more than 50 percent of Google searches globally. Boosted by the growth of 5G devices and networks, and increased pressure on CISOs to upgrade enterprise networks for strong network security, many enterprise and websites will accelerate their eventual conversion to IPv6 in 2021. However, many other ISPs, content providers and retailers, hard-hit by pandemic shutdowns, have web sites that are still IPv4 only and will remain unable to fund a conversion of their IT infrastructure. CGNAT can help extend their investment.

Service Providers Move to the Edge – Faster than Expected

Service providers will have to re-architect their access networks to accommodate the traffic shift from dense urban areas to suburban as work/play/learn at home continues, post-pandemic. Edge computing is forecast by IDC to exceed 50 percent of new infrastructure deployments by 2023 and identified by nearly all mobile operators as extremely important to future networks. 

The Pandemic will have a Lasting Impact on Education – Remote/Online Learning will Continue Post Pandemic

The abrupt conversion of in-classroom learning to remote during the pandemic, will encourage educational institutions to offer online options to traditional in-classroom on a regular basis. This will expand education during illness, during period of inclement weather and other situations where a more flexible arrangement would be beneficial.

Lifestyles will be permanently altered by the pandemic and many will not want to return to commutes and less flexible working conditions. Remote work will become a new, acceptable alternative in many industries. The recent announcements by Tesla and Oracle to move corporate headquarters from tech talent-rich Silicon Valley in CA to Texas demonstrates a new trend. This will ultimately impact real estate, mass transportation plans and other social institutions that assume large-scale commutes to a few valuable job destinations. This shift will give a boost to distributed edge networks, cloud services and wireless that are less dependent upon centralized traffic aggregation.

That’s it for service providers….but here’s my final prediction:

2021 Prediction: This Year will be so Much Better than 2020 and We will all be so Glad

The COVID-19 vaccine will be hugely effective, and the world will establish an international day of togetherness in 2021.