Multi-cloud continues to gather momentum as leading suppliers announce products and services designed to help IT departments provision, manage and secure the many different cloud services they lease from different providers simultaneously.

These announcements mark two standout trends: firstly, the continuing shift away from product based hardware or software license fees into a service-orientated model that offers both more flexibility and less risk of overpaying for underused infrastructure for the buyer; and secondly the establishment of an all-important recurring revenue streams for the supplier.

In today’s world of dynamic corporate networks and ever-developing security threats, traditional network security can be imagined as an ancient castle. In this modern connected world, those ancient structures are crumbling.

The pace of scale of enterprise and service provider SD-WAN deployment accelerated sharply in 2017

2017 was a good year for software defined wide area networks (SD-WANs), as increasing numbers of end user organisations replaced branch office routers with lower cost and easier to manage virtualised solutions.