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Recently, it was reported that a nation-state threat-actor managed to infiltrate a large number of organizations—including multiple US government agencies. They did this by distributing backdoor software, dubbed SunBurst, by compromising SolarWind’s Orion IT monitoring and management software update system. Based on SolarWind’s data, 33,000 organizations use Orion’s software, and 18,000 were directly impacted by this malicious update. As more and more details have become available, it has become clear that this is one of the most evasive and significant cyberattacks to date.

The advantages of such consolidation efforts are clear, ranging from reducing the overall footprint of vendors inside the network to reducing the overhead associated with deploying, managing, optimizing, and maintaining those solutions. But analysts at Gartner recently conducted a survey finding that more than 85% of organizations that pursue a vendor consolidation strategy find it challenging to reduce the total number of vendors.

Many businesses have viewed 4G networks just as a mobility play because there was less opportunity for building services on top of mobile connectivity. But 5G changes this perspective. It has the capability to address business segment needs and use cases beyond connectivity in addition to the consumer segment. This intersection of a platform to drive business and consumers is one of the big promises with 5G.

Customer Perspectives

Software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) has been growing rapidly on the corporate side of many organizations. Its benefits have been convincing CIO’s everywhere to ditch their expensive MPLS links for a better WAN technology for connecting their branch locations. Recently, the OT side of the house has started to realize that SD-WAN makes a lot of sense for their distributed operational environments as well. As a result, OT environments are adopting SD-WAN to realize key benefits including reliable connectivity, simplified management, and lower total cost of ownership. Of course, OT asset operators have some specialized needs for deploying an SD-WAN solution at their non-environmentally controlled locations that include, among others, something that is secure, compact, rugged, and able to be remotely deployed, managed, and monitored.

Secure SD-WAN consolidates advanced routing, next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities, and intuitive orchestration into a single, integrated solution. But there’s an important aspect to secure SD-WAN that’s sometimes overlooked in the industrywide rush to categorize and market the technology: self-healing.

This holiday season, due to the ongoing global pandemic, checking off that gift list will look a little different than in past years. Many shoppers are planning to rely on e-commerce for most—if not all—of their holiday shopping rather than perusing the aisles in big box stores and shopping malls. Digital gift card sales are also likely to increase.

The need to maximize user experience, whether for employees or customers, has been a driving force behind much of the digital transformation networks have undergone. Things like business-critical applications, data-driven manufacturing and supply chains, immediate access to essential information, and advanced productivity tools require uninterrupted access to information from any place, using any device, and from any location.

Another year, another cyber Monday—and another opportunity for cybercriminals. But unlike previous years, the 2020 holiday shopping season is already expected to pose more challenges. As concerns around COVID-19 discourage the popular in-person deal hunting, more shoppers are expected to descend upon e-commerce. And many sought-after items could be in short supply. As a result, both consumers and retailers must be especially wary of opportunistic scammers who will offer too-good-to-miss deals in order to steal sensitive information and profit off their victims’ losses.

We are very proud of this latest recognition from Gartner. And proud of our commitment to serve more than 480,000 customers across the world by tackling some of the biggest and most diverse challenges in networking and security. The threat landscape continues to evolve and more than ever organizations need a security solution to meet the demands of today’s digital businesses and dynamic network environments.