INTELLIGENT CLOUD
cloud-first strategy, the complexity in
integrated public clouds is driving partners
to explore PaaS offerings from existing
SaaS providers and build out required
applications from there.
Cloud services have been a safe bet in
the Boardroom in recent years, but now
the question is, are they truly secure?
Decisions to utilise cloud services have
been a relatively easy Boardroom decision,
due to their known cost and agility. But
with more and more high-profile data
breaches, questions are now being asked
around cloud security at a Board level
within businesses. The damaging nature
of cyber-attacks is now clearly in the line
of sight of Board members. GDPR will also
raise more questions at this level, making
cyber security a Board level priority.
Cyber threats are becoming ever more
sophisticated and increasing in volume.
In addition, remote working or working
across multiple sites and multiple
devices, together with an increasing
reliance on cloud-based applications,
have all served to weaken traditional
perimeter-based security.
The workforce today is mobile, often
working across numerous devices, from
any location. Employees commonly use
applications hosted in the cloud. They
expect ongoing availability of whatever
network they are connected to. Network
management, therefore, can be complex,
with the need to manage application and
network performance more important
than ever. Network Performance
Management and Application
Performance Management will become
the norm for enterprises in 2018, with
a focus on user experience, resolving
application and network performance
issues proactively and quickly, and
improving productivity.
Organisations are embracing
web, video conferencing, and unified
communication and collaboration tools to
improve productivity among employees.
This means enterprises will need to ensure
they are building networks with enough
capacity to support these new applications.
Bandwidth requirements will continue to
increase in 2018, driven by the adoption
34
Resellers
who develop
software which
utilises public
cloud services,
which embraces
artificial
intelligence,
which solves
a customer
problem, will be
able to create
and sustain long
term business
relationships.
of advanced video collaboration and
applications in the enterprise.
There is much more focus today on the
overall user interface and user experience,
with video becoming a key technology
to drive better communication and
collaboration. Video deployments were
traditionally seen as only commercially
viable for the midmarket and enterprise,
but advances in lower cost hardware
and IP connectivity, combined with the
availability of cloud based Virtual Meeting
Rooms has meant that video is finally
becoming a prevalent communications
medium for small businesses, and will
become a key new revenue stream for
resellers and service providers in 2018.
There has been very strong growth
and adoption of SaaS as a concept in 2017
and now end users have an expectation
that they can purchase their entire unified
collaboration solution on this basis.
In fact, the Unified Collaboration as a
services market in EMEA is expected to be
worth $1.15 billion by 2020. Users want
to see providers deliver a full turnkey
solution for voice and video hardware,
engineering and cloud services, all on a
simple consumption-based pricing plan.
Software Defined Wide Area Network
will finally come of age in 2018, with
SD-WAN adoption gathering pace in the
enterprise. The burgeoning technology has
shown remarkable growth in recent years
with IDC predicting the SD-WAN market
will be worth $8 billion by 2021. It is driving
digital transformation projects that deploy
cloud, big data and analytics, and mobility
– which all increase network workloads and
require end-to-end reliability.
WLAN deployment upgrades will grow
faster than ever in 2018, driven by the
rapid speeds of 802.11AC and the fast-
evolving analytics engines and applications
that provide insight and intelligence to end
users and devices
In addition, the explosion in Internet of
Things endpoints will also fuel the growth
of WLAN technology. It is estimated there
will be 20.4 billion connected things in
use worldwide by 2020, and analysts
at Dell’Oro predict that there will be an
installed base of nearly a billion WLAN
network devices within five years, which
will be the primary way that most IoT
devices connect to networks.
Traditional firewall technology is no
longer enough. Anyone designing or
planning a new network deployment in
2018 must adopt a security first mantra,
with security being embedded into the
network elements and design. When a
network has security inherently built
into it, operates alongside other security
platforms, and is managed with consistent,
properly enforced policies, it becomes the
security defence.
There will be a continued increase in
focus on unified collaboration security
and analytics. With GDPR looming and a
growing threat from cyber-attacks, further
consideration will be needed in the unified
collaboration space to protect end user
data, and also ensure protection against
hacking and cyber threats.
Issue 15
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS