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. 

By: Partha Narasimhan, CTO of Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company

We enter 2021 in a very different place from where we were at the start of 2020. The role of networking and more broadly, the IT function, has more often become the hero – and sometimes the scorn – of business continuity and resilience in the face of the pandemic. As CIOs soak up the praise or take their lumps, they must now look to the horizon and define their approach and strategy in a post-pandemic world.

Aruba has identified four major trends that CIOs now face that can make or break an organization’s IT program:

• The rise of the hybrid workforce and how that will evolve during and after the pandemic
• The changing role of network security integrated across the fabric of the network
• Graduating from uptime networking metrics to user satisfaction metrics, examining networking holistically as part of the broader IT technology stack
• Staying the course in implementing automation in networking operations, despite challenges posed by the LAN, WAN and Cloud

The Hybrid Workforce is Here to Stay

Despite recent advances in vaccines for COVID-19, many roles may still not fully return to the office until late 2021, and in many cases, not at all. After speaking with CIOs from across the country, what is clear is that some amount of remote working will remain after the pandemic exits. That admission portends profound changes for physical office spaces, corporate culture, connectivity, and networking.

What many organizations thought would be temporary remote setups to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic infection rate, have evolved to form the hybrid workforce of the future, where employees will work from home, the office, or anywhere else – wherever they have a secure and reliable connection.

For IT, this crisis has presented enormous challenges, but there is a silver lining. CEOs and their boards of directors have come to recognize the impact that IT can have on the business, including how fast change can be implemented, even under such stressful circumstances.

Now, CEOs and their boards are thinking about lessons learned from the pandemic to make networking, security, and the overall IT programs they oversee more flexible and dynamic. As a result, IT has a seat at the table in pushing forward ambitious forms of digital transformation, even accelerating existing planned transitions, emboldened with how the workforce has adapted to what has become known as the “new normal.”

Security Must Be Viewed Dynamically – from Endpoints, to the Edge, to the Cloud

With the maturation of the cloud and the growth of edge networking with its myriad endpoints – all accelerated by the explosion of IoT – how security is defined and implemented is now becoming part of the network architecture, and not some bolted-on component of the enterprise IT environment.

With the rise of remote working and the hybrid work environment, CSOs and CIOs are clamoring for a connected security approach. When looking at network design principles of the past, security experts essentially started with a policy and then designed a network topology that in turn satisfied policy, which meant that topology and policy were tightly coupled. That dynamic is drastically changing. Networking solutions have evolved to offer significant degrees of separation, where policy gets programmed when and where it is needed, and only when and where it is needed.

Zero Trust network architecture solutions will remain a core piece of effective security with traditional IT workloads moving out of the Edge into either the cloud or SaaS environment. The vacuum left behind is eventually going to be replaced by OT/IoT specific workloads at the Edge. Furthermore, with the implementation of 5G, the networking architecture must contend with multi-access edge compute (MEC) workloads – both private and public – all the more requiring dynamic approaches to security policy that must evolve beyond the user-centric workflows that Zero Trust is primarily optimized for today.

End-User Satisfaction is King

Key IT metrics are also evolving. It’s no longer sufficient to just keep the network infrastructure up and running. The metric du jour is user satisfaction which, from the CIO standpoint, is tied to employee productivity that can ultimately impact business profitability.

Networking and security teams are now focused on dynamic experiences that end-users want and expect with the services and applications they choose to use for improved productivity. Instead of asking just what kind of devices are connecting to the network, they are also required to focus on maintaining flexibility and agility while minimizing risk. The goal of network control goes hand-in-hand with business agility. By applying the appropriate security measures, CIOs can better facilitate this increasingly dynamic IT environment.

Ultimately, CIOs want insights beyond the network itself and into availability and performance applications that the users and business leaders care about. They are not as interested in how esoteric aspects of the network are performing, but rather, they’re more concerned about whether a specific user had a poor Zoom experience.

Staying the Course on Automation in Network Operations

Tied to understanding the needs and experience of end users is the maturation of network automation. But automation progress is not equal across the entire networking paradigm. In the data center, which is a more controlled environment when compared to the WAN or LAN, adoption is farther along. Changes in a data center are driven mostly in a naturally hierarchical structure and is thus easier to understand and manage through automation scripts.

The Edge (both LAN and WAN), on the other hand, is a more chaotic environment because changes are triggered by factors that are not totally within IT’s control – namely human and device behavior patterns that are constantly changing. There is a big need for leveraging AI and machine learning models to sense changes as soon as they occur and respond to the ones that seem persistent, even if for a short period of time. The maturity of deployed solutions that provide this learning component of automation at the Edge will improve significantly in 2021. There will also be significant progress in combining these with APIs and other automation tools that will deliver on the promised efficiencies and insights that IT leaders crave.

The pandemic has also heightened the interest in networking automation at the Edge among CIOs and IT leaders. According to a recent survey of 2,400 IT decision makers across the globe, 35% plan to increase their investment in in AI-based networking, as they seek more agile, automated infrastructures for hybrid work environments.

Making 2021 a Success

In 2020, businesses and the economy were rescued by a raft of communication technologies developed over the past 40 years, ranging from security, cloud connectivity, to managed and supported applications over the network. Now in 2021, the four trends outlined here can provide CIOs and IT leaders with the tools to be better equipped for navigating the unpredictability of today and beyond. They empower IT leaders from the top down to strategically position IT as the crucial function businesses need to successfully maneuver whatever the future holds, from pandemics to accelerating shifts in work culture trends and environments.