Five Top Technology Trends for 2011

2011 will bring the continued evolution of several major computing trends, like increased wireless deployment in the enterprise and expanded adoption of virtualization. However, SonicWALL also predicts that we’ll begin to see a few new security trends including more malicious attacks on the Apple OS.

Here are SonicWALL’s predictions for 2011:

Trend #1: 2011 will be a watershed year in the corporate battle over bandwidth
Business traffic now runs globally 24/7. Businesses increasingly rely upon mission-critical applications that are cloud-based (e.g., Salesforce.com) or streaming and latency-sensitive (e.g., teleconferencing and VoIP). These applications will continue to struggle to compete with business and personal use social media and peer-to-peer applications (e.g., Facebook and BitTorrent) 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 such as role, department and application type.

Trend #2: the big Mac attack
Everyone knows “the big one” is coming, but goes about their business acting as if it won’t - and we’re not talking about earthquakes. Apple Mac OS and iOS operating systems, previously 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, but any connected business networks as well. The growing business acceptance of jailbreaking to customize applications has only made Apple devices potentially more vulnerable. Now more than ever, IT will need to ensure that proper policies and solutions (such as platform-agnostic firewalls and heuristics) are in place to protect their corporate information resources from Apple-borne attacks.

Trend #3: the shift to information security
Mobility and virtualization have resulted in a borderless network. Businesses can no longer think just in terms of network security, but instead must shift focus to information security. Over the next year, information security solutions will increasingly augment and enhance traditional malware signature defences with advanced heuristics and behavioural 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 problem
With 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 now 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.