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Network Security

As the enterprise digitize and transform their networks, security plays a critical role.

Organizations are rapidly evolving and expanding their networks to keep up with the digital economy. As the global economy reaches digital supremacy, and organizations transform their networks, security plays a critical role and also needs to evolve to keep up with new business demands.

With coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic adding to an evolving set of risks to already challenged security operations and budgets, reducing enterprise risk is more complex than ever. For the office environment, having hundreds, if not thousands of additional home workers, will test a company’s server capability and its VPN bandwidth, and driving IT professionals’ time and attention away from looking out for potential cybersecurity threats. For those workers, the question they need to ask is: “how secure is the Wi-Fi connection that I’m working from?” They are now reliant on a third-party service, where identity will start playing a bigger and bigger role to free IT directors from the burden of routine tasks like access approvals and data compliance, and allowing them to focus on higher-value security and business threats.

Imagine being part of an organisation that has thousands of employees around the world, with close to half working away from the office across the globe, and close to 90 percent in certain regions or countries, all the while ensuring that everyone logging on remotely is actually an employee and not a cybercriminal. This is just one example of change and increased complexity in modern businesses and IT systems that would either slow workers down or lead to significant security compromises. In this ever-changing world, it is important to maintain a robust security approach to all employees – whether they work from the office or from Antarctica.

The modern enterprise is built with agility at its core. But most security tools and processes were designed for a less-dynamic, and so organisations have traded security for agility. IT leaders need to restore the balance between agility and security. However, it is arguably more difficult to do this than ever before, in part due to a tectonic shift toward the cloud. However, by adopting cloud-native and DevOps practices, and placing a focus on security policy, IT security can help the enterprise achieve that necessary balance.

With the introduction of stricter compliance regulations and the deployment of increasingly complex network infrastructures, enterprise adoption of and reliance on encryption continues to improve. Cryptographic encryption protocols, namely, secure-sockets layer (SSL) and its successor, transport-layer security (TLS), were estimated by Gartner to be implemented across 80 percent of enterprise web traffic in 2019, and the Ponemon Institute found that 43 percent of organisations had a consistent, enterprise-wide encryption strategy in place. However, threat actors have also started to leverage encryption and are hiding their nefarious activities among regular encrypted traffic, making malicious packets nearly impossible to detect. Fortunately, by using AI, enterprises can achieve a quicker and more accurate analysis of all traffic on their network to check for beaconing behaviour.

The COVID-19 crisis is likely to be with us for a while. Organizations and their employees will be forced to make tough decisions rapidly, and enabling a remote workforce is one of those decisions. There are risks involved in accomplishing this at speed, but the security of the networks, devices, and data should not be among them.

The market

The global network security market is anticipated to register considerable growth over the next five years. Need for security on any network is apparent, as network security issues are increasing exponentially, network administrators are focused to integrate new technologies and components. Network security comprises services and products used to detect and monitor prevent malfunction or misuse and prevent unauthorized access. Owing to the grown number of hackers, network security has been gaining prominence over the past few years.

Both small and large end use industries have begun to invest in network security to manage risks beyond their capabilities. These systems may offer reduced costs and increased workforce productivity thereby offering significant competitive advantages to the investors. With advent of wireless technologies, telecommunication, internet and technologies such as organizational network and BYOD are becoming vulnerable to attacks for data thefts. However, in order to protect the wireless network, various vendors have established several offerings including IPS/IDS, firewall, on-appliance reporting, content filtering, data leak preventing, load balancing, gateway antivirus, network intrusion prevention and anti-spam detection.

Network security management solutions offer various advantages including reduced technical training requirement, regulatory compliances, integrated approach and cost effectiveness. Network security market segmentation on the basis of solution includes unified threat management (UTM), identity and access management, encryption, detection system/intrusion prevention (IDS/IPS) and firewall. Expected drivers are efficient compliance with industrial and government regulations and new technologies enabling competitive business However, economic slowdown resulting in reduction of security budget, increase in product price, customer fear of single point failure for network traffic and increased competition from specialized vendors. Nevertheless, the market is expected to continue the growth momentum in short to medium terms, as enterprises are expected to deploy security solutions due to the security challenges arising from upcoming trends such as cloud computing and social media. Key vendors dominating the global market include Symantec Corp., McAfee, Sophos Ltd., Ruckus, Motorola Solutions, Juniper Solutions, Fortinet, Cisco Systems Inc., Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Aruba Networks , Aerohive, Honeywell and ADT. 

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