Security in Converged Networks

whitePaper | December 12, 2022

Ethernet is ubiquitous—it is the core technology that defines the Internet and serves to connect the world in ways that people could not imagine even one generation ago. HPC clusters are working on solving the most challenging problems facing humanity—and cloud computing is the service hosting many of the application workloads struggling with these questions.

whitePaper | September 19, 2022

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is unleashing fundamental innovation in the way organizations buy, deploy, and operate network infrastructures. By leveraging open standards and commodity hardware, NFV delivers cost savings, enhanced flexibility, improved performance, and more. However, without the right safeguards, organizations can also see their vulnerabilities increase when they move to a Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) architecture. This white paper offers a detailed look at the unique security implications of adopting NFV approaches, and it provides a number of best practices to employ to ensure sensitive data and transmissions remain secure in these environments.

whitePaper | July 8, 2021

Enterprise and residential market dynamics, 5G, and the cloud are driving new applications—and creating new revenue opportunities for Communications Service Providers (CSPs). But these emerging use cases are also creating challenges: new traffic patterns, the move to virtualized and distributed applications, and the need for higher bandwidth and lower latency connectivity to end-users. IP/Optical convergence can play a key role in helping CSPs address these, but where does the path to architecture evolution begin? For every CSP, the journey is unique. With Ciena’s solutions, CSPs can start—and build—from their existing networks to evolve to a more streamlined, programmatic infrastructure that can serve as the foundation for innovation in the distributed services and content era.

whitePaper | July 12, 2021

Today’s hybrid workforce of both remote and in-office employees is the new normal as the world adapts to the COVID-19 pandemic. IT security teams are struggling to support this new global digital workforce that needs reliable, secure, and fast access to the Internet. Cyber attackers are also taking advantage of this new normal, so how do organizations prevent growing threats from web and email vectors? Traditional security strategies of routing Internet traffic through a VPN increase latency, slow performance, and disrupt the user experience. The solution that avoids these problems is to bypass the VPN by using cloud-delivered isolation, enabling organizations to provide their global workforce with completely secure access to the Internet. Menlo’s new ebook, Securing the Future of Work, discusses how organizations can deliver consistent security services to this new digital workforce through isolation in the cloud.

whitePaper | July 20, 2021

In 2Q21, Heavy Reading surveyed 86 communications service providers (CSPs) across global regions on their plans for customer premises equipment overall and universal CPE (uCPE) specifically. This report presents the highlights of that survey. Omdia’s uCPE Tracker – 1H21 Annual Forecast report projects that the worldwide uCPE hardware market will grow from $52.5m in 2020 to $2.3bn in 2025—an impressive CAGR of 113% over five years. With this in mind, Heavy Reading expected to see good support for uCPE from survey respondents, and we were not disappointed. We targeted the survey at CSPs planning to implement uCPE within, at most, 24 months. Nevertheless, the respondent pool showed a more lively than anticipated adoption of uCPE. 59% of US, 61% of Asia Pacific (APAC), and 39% of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) respondents have already deployed uCPE.

whitePaper | June 21, 2021

ince its launch in the mid-1990s, SONET has been an extremely successful technology, with millions of nodes deployed and billions of dollars made from the incredibly diverse set of applications it has supported. This paper explains the technology evolution of SONET and lays out the case for why service providers should consider migrating their legacy networks to IP-based transport.