Technology Reseller v37

technologyreseller.co.uk 07 TECH TRENDS improve productivity and 79% question its positive impact on customer relationships. Even so, just 8% believe the traditional way of operating is more effective. www.sigmadynamics.co.uk CONNECTIVITY SD-WAN still in early adopter phase The latest WAN Market Size Report from telecommunications market research and consulting firm TeleGeography reveals that while new software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) services are gaining traction, enterprise spend in the $75.9 billion wide area networking (WAN) market is still dominated by MPLS and Local Access services. It notes that MPLS spend in 2020 was $32.6 billion, representing 43% of the WAN market, with SD-WAN accounting for only $1.6 billion or 2.15% of the market. After MPLS, demand was biggest for Local Access, with $28.9 billion in total spend or 38.2% of the market, and Direct Internet Access (DIA), with $12.4 billion in spend or 16.33% of the market. Broadband’s contribution to WAN spend was just $279 million, or 0.37% of the market, largely due to its low-cost pricing. TeleGeography analyst Elizabeth Thorne said: “As the migration from MPLS to SD-WAN continues, we expect the global WAN market to achieve greater balance in the coming years. Despite the hype around SD-WAN, MPLS is still a force in the WAN market, and it will continue to be a preferred option for many enterprises. Our expectation is that as MPLS spend declines, broadband, DIA and SD-WAN will increase market share. SD-WAN uptake is still toward the end of the early adopter cycle.” www.telegeography.com Dedicated managed connections in demand as home working looks set to continue More than two thirds (68%) of organisations would provide homeworkers with a dedicated, managed connection to their corporate network to make it easier for employees to work from home, reveals new research from Daisy Corporate Services (DCS). More than four out of five (85%) of the 350 senior employees surveyed by the provider of secure IT, communications and cloud services expect up to half of their employees to continue to work from home over the next year, with almost a quarter of organisations expecting to downsize their office space as a result. The biggest technology challenges respondents have encountered with remote working to date are shared broadband connections (40%), cybersecurity risks (40%) and connectivity performance (39%). Richard Beeston, Product Director at DCS, believes that organisations can no longer expect homeworkers to ‘get by’ using their existing Internet connectivity. He said: “As homeworking models mature, we’d expect to see increased investments in connectivity and security as remote access to systems, applications and data becomes the norm.” Almost half (46%) of respondents to the DCS survey said that cybersecurity risk management of remote workers was an essential part of ongoing homeworking strategies. Areas of investment for the next 12 months include protection against data theft (cited by 60%), VPN (48%), recovery from a cyber breach (47%) and penetration testing (41 %). dcs.tech CYBER SECURITY The forgotten victims of data breaches Analysis by F-Secure highlights the impact that large-scale data breaches have on individuals and families that use affected online services. The Walking Breached: How Data Breaches put People at Risk of Cyber Crime shows that while nearly 3 out of 10 respondents to F-Secure surveys have experienced some form of cyber-crime in the previous 12 months (e.g.malware/virus infections, unauthorised access to email or social media accounts, credit card fraud, cyber bullying), cyber-crime was three times as common among those who used an online service that had been breached (60% versus 22%). https://blog.f-secure.com/ the-walking-breached/ Time to demystify cyber security, says Kaspersky Kaspersky is calling on security vendors to demystify cybersecurity following research highlighting a disconnect between business leaders and vendors, which it warns is leading to flaws in cyber-defences. In recent research by the company, 63% of business leaders said cybersecurity messages from vendors are too complicated to convey to the wider business, with almost 60% saying it would take up too much time and resources to attempt to do so. A similar number say the information they receive isn’t relevant to their business. Kaspersky says this matters because it prevents businesses from addressing employees’ risky behaviour. In a separate survey, more than a quarter of workers admitted to bypassing security measures to download unauthorised software, with 30% connecting to a mobile hotspot to do so and almost a third believing an employer’s security protocols are less important when working from home. Kaspersky advises vendors and organisations to start closing the gap by: n Enforcing strong passwords and updating them when required; n Making sure that employees who work remotely use a corporate VPN; n Carrying out regular updates on laptops and devices; n Ensuring employees store data in one place so that, if a system is compromised, data can be retrieved much more easily; n Ensuring important data is encrypted; n Ensuring that data is regularly backed up; n Ensuring that staff apply network encryption and a strong administrator password to their routers; and n Limiting how often staff carry out personal tasks, such as banking or personal email, on work devices. www.kaspersky.com Security still biggest barrier to cloud adoption More than half (58%) of UK business decision-makers say security remains the biggest barrier to public cloud adoption in their organisations. A survey of 200 decision-makers in large and medium- sized organisations by Censuswide for Centrify, a provider of modern privileged access management (PAM) solutions, also reveals that 35% of organisations that have adopted cloud are less than 80% confident that it is completely secure. Almost half (45%) said the largest exposure point was the increasing amount of machine identities and service accounts, such as those used by servers and applications. More than one in four companies (28%) have been targeted by a cloud hacking attempt in the last 12 months. Continued...