Juniper Networks’ predictions for 2016

Security

Incorporates and aligns to Security key messages.

Cyberattacks Become Even More Physical

In recent years we saw the impossible turn possible: cyberattacks, those that much of society felt lived in a silo, broke the surface and resulted in actual physical damage on critical infrastructure that the human eye could see. In 2015, we saw it’s now possible for cars, health devices, drones and even remote skateboards to get hacked. Fast forward to 2016: we’ll see both consumer and corporate IoT devices result in physical harm or a major disruption to business. In 2015, financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley, Experian, and Scottrade were victims of cyber attack.The Ponemon Institute surveyed 58 companies and found that cyberattacks had cost companies an average of $15.4 million in 2015, an amount 20 percent higher than the year before. Financial markets will be manipulated and become the next battleground. Think Stuxnet but for business.

IoT may give hackers more opportunities, but if we remain fearful of the risks, we remain backward. The point is not to prevent network attack completely but to make the network so secure it deters threats, as found in one of the results from a study by both Juniper Networks and RAND Corporation on cybersecurity titled “The Economics of Defense: Making the Right Security Investments in an Era of Escalating Cyber Threats”.

Rio 2016 Becomes the Next Black Hat…Don’t Dare Turn on your Phone

It’s an age old rule at security conferences like Black Hat and DefCon: keep your phone off, in your room or use a burner phone. Now security conference habits will become mainstream at enormous societal events where hackers can obtain prime information directly from your mobile. Avoiding public Wi-Fi and shutting down Bluetooth will become the norm. The same sort of attitude will apply to laptops. It’ll then just be a matter of ensuring consumers are fully aware, and understanding, of the risks if they don’t.

Security Armies Deployed to the Cloud

It’s a collaborative, joint force to battle the evil hordes of hackers, viruses, malware, and bots. The future of data protection and integrity is going to come from letting multiple security vendors work together to fight on your behalf. From the infrastructure to cloud apps, it’s a combination of army corps and special forces that are taking the battle to the cloud for single sign-on for users and consistent policy application.

Data Center/Cloud

Aligns to Silicon, SDN, Virtualization and People messages

Networks Will Become Progressively Smarter

As networks continue to adapt and evolve heading into 2016, observers will be will be increasingly amazed at how smart networks have progressively become. Juniper believes that computing and storage capabilities will collapse into a single computation function to sit right next to the data it is working on. This change will be a primary driver for hyperconverged computing to become the standard way of doing things. This need for hybrid data will be critical due to data sovereignty requirements in areas where high density of countries reside (i.e. Europe). According to Gartner, the desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. Gartner said that just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016.  Previously, the rate of innovation by humans has been determined almost entirely by the total amount of compute power, storage capacity, and network bandwidth resources available. However, networking is special because by connecting compute and storage elements, it allows developers to transcend the limitations that compute and storage always run into.

100G Networks Become the Norm Due to Marketplace Demands

The drive for faster, more scalable networks will only intensify in 2016. Software defined networking (SDN), a technology that was adopted heavily in 2015 as more and more companies realized its value, will increasingly meet these demands. A study by independent research firm Heavy Reading for Napatech reveals that network appliances are now undergoing a fundamental transition in response to increased transport network throughput and the impact of virtualization. It also shows that the impact of NFV and SDN on network appliances is expected to be profound and 100G penetration in core transport net-works is forecast to grow from 22% today to 75% by 2018. SDN controllers will be more widely deployed thanks to turnkey SDN solutions. The push for more scale has customer verticals taking aggressive steps to adjust to the increased network demand. For example, in education, universities are moving to 100G quickly because they are getting federal funding to subsidize the cost change.

Singapore was named the top five smart city globally for 2015 and deservedly so. With the slews of initiations following the Smart Nation vision, Singapore looks to a future of an interconnected city that utilises technology to develop solutions in areas including home-based services, transport, healthcare, and community services. The initiatives cut across infrastructure, software and services identified as necessary components to support a smart nation blueprint.

Commercialization of open source networking projects to take flight in 2016

Open source networking projects are growing in interest, driven in part by heavy demand for more flexibility and efficiency. However, commercial versions of the projects are still few and far between. 2016 will be the year that changes, with Silicon Valley heavyweights Facebook and Google championing the opening up of platforms. With standards changing and platforms opening up to end vendor lock-in, these developments will aid the open networking movement’s momentum. In addition, open networking tools will rise as data centers themselves adapt to the changing times as well. A new landscape, which seems to signal a data center that’s more open than ever before.

Containerized Applications are Finally Ready for Mass Enterprise Adoption

Containerized applications are evolving with enterprises large and small taking notice. Recent announcements from Docker now allow for containers to discover where in the cluster, in the data center, or even in a remote cloud their sister containers were residing and automatically connect to them. In addition the increasing adoption of Kubernetes, created and supported by Google, has gained traction and momentum with events like Kubecon. With better connectivity and claims that overall security has been improved, a sticking point for enterprises in the past when it comes to evaluating containerization technology, all signs are pointing towards rampant adoption in 2016.

SP Routing

Aligns to White Box Switching, Silicon, Virtualization, People messages

Service Providers Feel More Pressure From Web 2.0 Companies

As Google, Facebook and AWS are all starting to expand into the traditional service provider space, causing industry pundits to believe more innovative thinking, creative business models and new services could be on the way via either proprietary network infrastructure or in the form of OTT riding atop the SP network. Either way, companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast will need to determine in 2016 what “coopetition” really looks like and start using virtualization technology combined with their network infrastructure to their advantage to change consumer perception about how they innovate to delivery business outcomes.

NFV Use Cases Expand Significantly

While 2015 saw vendors touting new NFV solutions and customers starting to pay closer attention, we will in 2016 start seeing more concrete use cases of the technology deployed in the field to deliver new services in record time and realize operational efficiencies. This will not only yield greater business agility, but will force the current IT workforce to evaluate and bolster their skillset to effectively manage resources in this new reality.  Organizations will change their structural models to utilize agile development processes in this software defined world and a migration from netops to devops.

Virtualization Gives Telcos/MSO New Business Horizons – And New Data Challenges

Software and virtualization technologies will let service providers expand surgically into new markets that they previously deemed unprofitable. As such, we will see a 10x increase in regions served around the world – and subsequently, a parallel increase in the number of connected devices and humans. Because of this, service providers will need to devise new ways of more efficiently managing data throughput given the new demands being placed on the network from all facets of the globe.

Revenue Diversification Takes Hold

It will be the year of NFV, no doubt. Part of this means service providers can look to diversity their revenue streams via new services delivered from their cloud and partner clouds, through experimentation in new services delivered to market that leverage NFV, which were previously not feasible with a rigid hardware-only based model, and with more efficient resource management. In 2016, we’ll start to see early trials of this take shape, such as the notion of sponsored data and new workloads as business partners with enterprises to solve a greater scope of problems – (example in IoT, moving up the services stack, etc.)