The year 2020 has shown more than ever that the increasing dependency on the Internet and on cloud services requires a greater degree of adaptability and increased internal collaboration between different IT departments and departments. Angelique Medina, Director at ThousandEyes, has taken a closer look at the individual developments and gives an assessment of the IT security challenges in 2021.
Trouble-free and reliable internet connections played a central role in 2020 for companies that increasingly rely on cloud services and home offices. To the chagrin of many companies, however, it quickly became clear that the Internet is a fragile and complex construct that is based on the cooperation of many different service providers. In the past year, companies therefore had to deal with a large number of disruptions in terms of IT security, some of which were caused by BGP hijacking.
Internet and SaaS as more central components
The most momentous failure in 2020, which affected a large part of the global data traffic, had other causes, however. The malfunction was based on an accidentally wrong announcement of routes of the service provider CenturyLink / Level 3. This resulted in far-reaching failures.
"In 2021, specialist knowledge of the Internet and its structure will become a sought-after competence for IT security specialists," explains Angelique Medina. “Only with the help of these competencies will companies be able to quickly identify and rectify failures and malfunctions. In particular, since companies are increasingly affected by problems that are not caused by in-house networks, these are more important than ever. This can reduce the risks and potential downtimes. "
SD-WAN solutions are gaining in importance
In the coming year, work in the home office will remain an integral part of the new work environment for many employees, some companies will reduce the number of their locations and SD-WAN will find its way into the home office.
"Already in 2020 there was a strong focus of SD-WAN providers on the topic of IT security", reports Angelique Medina. "As companies are increasingly demanding more scalable SD-WAN solutions that can also be used in the home office, providers are coming under increasing pressure."
In the coming year, companies will rely less on VPN environments, which route all network and Internet traffic from their locations and home office environments to the company network and data center. You will move on to implementing solutions in which central policies route the data traffic safely and with optimal performance directly to the desired destination.
Tech giants are improving connectivity
In 2020, large tech companies such as Facebook, AWS and Google again made significant investments in internet and infrastructure projects such as the deep-sea cables 2Africa and Grace Hopper. Trouble-free and reliable Internet connections will remain essential for companies and consumers in the years to come. The big tech companies will therefore continue to expand their commitment to ensure access to their services. This fact is also gaining in importance because the services of these companies are increasingly becoming the basis for the digital world.
API as an important monitoring object
Technological innovations such as voice control and contactless payment were particularly popular in 2020 and are being used by more and more people in everyday life. This trend will continue in the coming months. Backend systems on which these services are based must therefore be included in the monitoring concept for good IT security.
The performance of IoT applications and smart devices also depends to a large extent on the accessibility of third-party APIs and the networks of the cloud providers. In 2021, in-depth end-to-end monitoring functions will therefore become increasingly important in order to be able to ensure the smooth functionality of the systems.
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Angelique Medina, Director at ThousandEyes
In 2020, the Internet proved to be the lifeline for essential applications for many companies. The Internet is a complex construct of independent and at the same time networked providers, each of which can impair the user experience of a website or application. Cloud providers and providers of content delivery networks (CDN) therefore offer access to private backbones and thus promise better performance and reliability - of course against payment.
"For companies, the smooth availability and uninterrupted provision of their services has become an important prerequisite for business success," states Angelique Medina. "As a result, in 2021 we will see an increase in companies circumventing the shortcomings of the public internet by paying for their own private internet."
New as-a-service solution across all IT areas
“Cloud-based services are ubiquitous and with every new as-a-service solution, the focus is on collaboration between previously isolated IT teams,” explains Medina. “This can also be explained by the fact that companies want to retain control over the quality of their digital offerings. If applications and services are migrated to the cloud, a number of complex services with external dependencies must also be taken over, into which companies have little insight. "
Collaborative cooperation between various actors, including network engineers, application developers and IT security experts, is therefore increasingly becoming the focus in order to operate and manage these solutions.
"Since collaboration within IT teams is the key to success and this collaboration has to take place regardless of the respective functions, a common operating language will become increasingly important in 2021," explains Angelique Medina. “Monitoring systems for cross-system visibility in internal and external environments will become an essential part of IT operations in the future. These technologies enable internal IT teams and even external service providers to quickly and easily find a common denominator in order to optimize and accelerate error identification and rectification.
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About ThousandEyes ThousandEyes, the Internet and Cloud Intelligence company, enables comprehensive insight into the Internet based on aggregated information. This enables companies and service providers to work together to optimize quality for end users. The ThousandEyes platform uses information from a variety of global data points on the Internet, from data centers, VPCs and end-user devices to highlight dependencies that affect service delivery and performance. This enables companies to understand and optimize the user experience of customers and employees of digital websites, applications and services. ThousandEyes is central to the world's largest and fastest growing companies, including more than 140 of the Global 2000, over 80 of the Fortune 500, six of the top seven US banks, and 20 of the top 25 SaaS companies. For more information, please visit www.ThousandEyes.com or follow us on Twitter @ThousandEyes.