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  4. Technology Trends and Predictions 2018, Part 1

Last updated February 15th, 2023 by Reuven Harrison

Reuven Harrison, Chief Technology Officer
Joe Schreiber, Technical Director, Business Development

In this two-part series, we play the role of security soothsayer and share our insights on the technology trends that will impact network security in 2018.

We’ve been advocating for security automation for several years, and we’ve noticed a shift in the way people view this technology. In the beginning, people thought they were losing control by automating network security processes. Now, if you’re not automating, not only are you missing out on the agility benefits, but your security level is reduced because chances are, you’re making mistakes through human error. Automation enables you to make changes while avoiding manual mistakes, elevating your agility and security.  

That brings us to our first prediction: automation will reach the tipping point in 2018. Automation will make the complete transition from “nice to have” to necessity. Network administration will be impossible to do without the ability to automate. Not only will it become widely adopted, we’re seeing the adoption of automation across a spectrum of security solutions. 

One of the things that is fueling the adoption of automation solutions is the risk that human error can lead to a data breach. We saw this several times in 2017. As for our next prediction, we believe that 2018 will be the end of the era of direct administration. At the close of 2017, companies were just starting to wake up to the fact that the way their IT infrastructures are assembled and configured could be the cause of a security breach. Security teams receive and process hundreds of change requests each week. Imagine trying to manually manage that amount of anything without making any mistakes, particularly when the potential consequences of even one mistake could be significant.

There is danger in manually configuring and updating your deployments, and because errors are inevitable with manual processes, this approach will no longer be permitted. Intermediaries that automatically analyze and design configuration changes before they are provisioned will become the norm.

Next up, we look at what 2018 will bring to cloud adoption. We predict that private cloud will (finally) take off. Adoption of private cloud will increase in 2018 as we’ll see more hybrid environments where private cloud is hosted by a public cloud provider, which up until now wasn’t a viable option.

Private cloud solutions that are hosted in the public cloud give organizations the elasticity and flexibility of running in the public cloud, with the additional security and privacy that comes from the private cloud. Organizations can get all these benefits, in addition to cheaper costs, more control over your data and the option to pay someone else to manage it.

In the next part of the series, we’ll look at such topics as the rise of containerization, machine learning, cyberattack trends, and more. Stay tuned!

 

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