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Top five networking trends for 2013: Sridhar Sarathy

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Deepa
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Sridhar Sarathy, vice pesident, operations, India Excellence Center, Juniper India lists out his top five networking trends for 2013.

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1. Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Although still in the nascent stage, SDN will slowly gain traction. Cloud computing and mobile Internet will place greater demands on the network infrastructure and SDN will go a long way in providing the agile service delivery that people will expect from the networks. Established networking vendors will ramp up on their SDN strategy/execution or look to acquire start-ups to get a leg-up on the competition.

2. Bring your own Device (BYOD) to work

Companies will have get onto the BYOD bandwagon. Younger employees who are part of the digital generation and who are used to their own devices will increasingly demand that they use the same devices at work. This will provide increased savings and productivity but companies will need to figure out their network infrastructure to support the plethora of devices and also need to pay more attention to security.

3. Web Security/Anti-Virus

One of the best kept secrets is that the anti-virus products are often not very good at stopping viruses. According to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products, there were 49 million new strains of virus in 2010. On an average, it takes almost a month for antivirus products to update their signatures to detect new viruses. By the time, an AV product hits the market to block a new virus, the damage has been done. In another study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, CA, 40 antivirus products made by top companies was tested against 82 new computer viruses.

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The initial detection rate was less than 5 per cent. Companies will now try new approaches - intrusion deception, behavior based blocking etc. The new approach could involve looking at suspicious activity wrt to servers, databases and files and use the behavior, patterns etc. to stop future attacks. It could also involve purposely leaving some holes in the firewall through which a hacker could enter but then is diverted to a part of the network that contains non-critical data. This kind of deception based approach will become mainstream web security.

4. Cloud Computing and Bandwidth of Networks

The data migration from PC to cloud will continue to grow exponentially. The need to store vast volumes of data will drive more innovation in computing and storage architectures. We will also see changes in virtualization, parallel computing, distributed storage and automation.

Low-bandwidth networks are a bottleneck in this path of progress. We will see a push towards 10G as the router interface and 100G as the trunk interface.

5. Wi-Fi Offloads

With spectrum being a scarce commodity, service providers will figure out a way for large-scale adoption of Wi-Fi offloading to increase the efficiency of the wireless network. They will need to do this to meet the increasing demands of smartphone users to access high bandwidth content.

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