It's always important to take analyst forecasts with a pinch of salt. Predicting the future is difficult at the best of times (see our article on predictions in ITProportal) and a single unexpected geo-political event (Brexit anyone?) can scupper the most meticulously prepared financial projection overnight.

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.

67 per cent of network managers see a digital strategy as important to reduce threat from competitors, yet 49 per cent say legacy technology is holding them back:

By Andy Butcher, UK Research and Education Sales Manager,  Axians

Malware and processing muscle to rent is swelling hacker armouries

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have severe consequences for their victims, causing considerable operational disruption and undermining trust in the organisation amongst customers, end users and business partners.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/enterprise-it/it-network/legacy-systems-continue-slow-digital-strategies/

The UK digital skills gap is nothing new - public and private sector organisations have been struggling to find people with the right talents to drive their digital transformation initiatives for the last few years if not longer.

http://axiansbloguk.com/project-type/technical-corner/

TalkTalk is well known for the voice and data connectivity services it offers to UK consumers, but it has been quietly building a flexible, high capacity IP network which also accommodates increasing numbers of business customers.

Revenue for TalkTalk Business accounted for over 30% of the £1.8bn total in the financial year ending March 2016, up 5% on the previous year and driven largely by growth in demand for data products, next generation voice services and broadband connections delivered by both its direct channel and wholesale partners.

Extended Feature Article:

The software defined data centre may be the promised land for providers struggling to deliver cloud services cost effectively at scale, but remains in the early stage of development.

Imagine a data centre uncluttered by legacy, dedicated network, server and storage hardware consolidated to the point where every application, service or process which can be delivered as a virtualised software function has been moved onto next generation architecture.