The industry reflects, looks ahead

By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Friday, March 14, 2008 06:39 PM

Matt Kolon, chief technology officer for Asia-Pacific, Juniper Networks

Matt Kolon,
Juniper Networks
Expect a focus on improving the application experience of the end user. That means recognizing that the application is what matters to the end user, and IT departments will increasingly focus on the importance of that experience.

Q. What do you remember as the biggest industry news for 2007, and why?
Kolon: We generally witnessed more interest in integrated security solutions. While there is still demand for more comprehensive solutions, customers are seeing the benefits of a unified threat management (UTM) approach to streamline their security stance. This is because the distributed branches of regional companies want a simplified, one-stop solution to thwart multiple threat types without the complexities of many point products. UTM reduces IT administrative overhead, allowing the IT department to focus on a single management interface. This optimizes training and troubleshooting.

Unified access control (UAC) is another highlight. Because the Internet has become the defacto access method for both internal and external resources, a central control point is now required to better manage security and deployment for different user groups and types.

Name three hot technologies to watch in 2008, and explain why.
Expect a focus on improving the application experience of the end user. That means recognizing that the application is what matters to the end user, and IT departments will increasingly focus on the importance of that experience. Controlling access to network resources in a simple and scalable way, is an example of how our customers have and will continue to address application performance and access. Other examples are improving application performance over the WAN and via 3G and WiMax.

IT departments are tasked to find cost-effective ways to better serve the existing needs of their internal customers, while at the same time budgeting time and money for innovation. This pulls IT departments in two directions, and makes budgets tight and planning difficult. Making the most out of what you have, and enhancing the existing experience, is the key driver for this. But it's important to recognize that the important thing is still the application, so we don't simply speak of "WAN acceleration", for example, but rather "application enhancement".

IT security continues to be a perennial problem. Please name up to three security trends that IT heads should look out for in 2008.
Next year will see larger and larger implementations of UAC into the enterprise. This will be driven by three requirements: greater need for compliance, more and better endpoint security due to the growing number of attacks targeted towards endpoints, and also the greater ease of implementation.

The introduction of SOH (Statement of Health) protocol into TCG as IF-TNCCS-SOH will more easily enable companies to pervasively implement endpoint security, authentication and authorization on Microsoft Windows Vista and XP operating systems.

Another big trend is the increasing consolidation of equipment functionality. Nobody wants to deploy more devices than they have to, so security is going to be increasingly seen as an integrated component of other devices. For example, while we've seen some manufacturers introduce branch routers with rudimentary security features, we have yet to see a true 'security router' that combines real routing performance with security worthy of a bank or government department. We'll see that before long.

There will be similar integration of other security capabilities in switches and other equipment as well. And of course, this consolidation extends to the application layer with the improvement and integration of UTM.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
... In staying flexible. That means being able to address innovation on one hand while keeping in mind Gartner's warning for next year, about the strong possibility for IT heads of recession. Of course, competitiveness requires innovation; nowhere more so than in IT, so it's not possible for the CIO to simply say "this is not an investment year". The trick is in investing in network flexibility that can be used in many ways to cut operating expenses and to innovate as conditions change.


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