SonicWall

BANGALORE, INDIA: 2011 will bring the continued evolution of several major computing trends, like increased wireless deployment in the enterprise and expanded adoption of virtualization. Nevertheless, we at SonicWALL as well predict that we'll begin to see a few new security trends including more malicious attacks on the Apple OS. Here are predictions for 2011:

Trend #1: 2011 will be a watershed year in the corporate battle over bandwidth Business traffic nevertheless runs globally 24/7. Businesses increasingly rely upon mission-critical applications that are cloud-based or streaming and latency-sensitive. These applications will continue to struggle to compete with business- and personal-use social media and peer-to-peer applications for dwindling bandwidth resources. By prioritizing bandwidth, application management will take priority in 2011. IT needs to be able to granularly visualize and flexibly prioritize or block bandwidth allocation as needed based on criteria just as role, department and application type. 

Trend #2: The big Mac attackEveryone knows "the big one" is coming, however goes about their business acting as if it won't-and we're not talking about earthquakes. Apple Mac OS and iOS operating systems, earlier considered off the radar from major malware threats, have so rapidly gained significant inroads as business tools that they have become highly attractive targets for profit-driven attacks. Such attacks not only threaten individual Apple devices, yet any connected business networks as so then. The growing business acceptance of jailbreaking to customize applications has only made Apple devices potentially more vulnerable. But more than ever, IT will need to ensure that proper policies and solutions are in place to protect their corporate information resources from Apple-borne attacks.

Mobility and virtualization have resulted in a borderless network. Businesses can no longer think just in terms of network security, however instead must shift focus to information security. Over the then year, information security solutions will increasingly augment and enhance traditional malware signature defenses with advanced heuristics and behavioral analyses algorithms. Security administrators will need granular visualization of all traffic-including Web-based applications-in order to establish and fine-tune policies and controls. Trends in Clean VPN, Clean WLAN, and Clean Pipe technologies will continue to evolve, presenting tighter and more manageable security solutions for the borderless network. The scope, scale and performance demands of securing a borderless environment will result in the development of massively scalable security architecture.

Trend #4: Ubiquitous mobility drives data leakage problemWith the employees adopting  iPhone 4, Droid and iPad, Smartphones and tablets have become standard business tools. Much in the way that laptops eclipsed desktops in the workplace a decade ago, mobile devices, are but the business tools of choice. To counter the proliferation of emerging consumer-based devices and platforms, SonicWALL predicts an increase in implementing platform-agnostic secure remote access and portal-base access. As a result, there will be a heightened focus around maintaining stricter security policies and security requirements around the management of devices.  As part of this, there is a growing trend towards deploying secure remote access over VPNs, particularly via secure Web-based portals using SSL VPN. 

Trend #5: Virtualization of application services drives better security More and more companies are being driven to virtualize their IT infrastructures based on sheer cost. Over the past year, virtualization has moved beyond its early hype into much broader deployment, and business applications have moved from dedicated servers to virtual servers and, increasingly, to the cloud. Businesses will continue the virtualization of data centers in 2011, and increasingly look to the cloud for virtualized application services-including virtualized security services.  Because of this trend, SonicWALL anticipates a trend that security around virtualization will have to become better.

In summary, as decade ends and another begins, look to see the culmination of old trends combined with the emergence of new ones. Increased mobility and teleworking will result in wider deployment of portal-based VPNs. A more cognizant business environment will deploy more virtualized applications and services. The struggle for bandwidth will generate need for enhanced application visualization and controls. Networked and mobile Apple devices will become targeted channels of attacks on businesses, and require platform-agnostic security solutions. In addition, the inevitable shift from network security to information security will demand more powerful, broadly reaching and massively scalable security architecture.