* Activities that are expected to have the greatest impact on the WAN
We recently surveyed 149 IT professionals and asked them to indicate the type of activities that would have the greatest impact on their IT organization over the next year. The survey respondents cited compliance and security as the top-two activities.
Since we only recently started to discuss compliance and its impact on the network, it was a little surprising to see compliance at the top of the list. It was also interesting to see how much overlap there was between the companies that rated compliance highly and the companies that rated security highly.
After talking to many of the survey respondents, it became clear that the overlap was driven by the fact that much of the regulations that they are responding to are very focused on security. An example of this is the Federal Information Security Management Act that requires each federal agency to develop, document and implement an agency-wide program to provide information security.
Relative to security, the survey respondents indicated that their organizations will be deploying additional firewalls, making a significant deployment of intrusion detection systems, and at least a modest deployment of intrusion protection systems. In addition, these organizations are also planning to make more use of security-oriented protocols such as SSL, SSH and HTTPS. The introduction of these protocols into the WAN is a good example of how the WAN is becoming more and more complex, in this case driven by the overlapping factors of compliance and security.
The next newsletter will describe some of the other activities that are impacting IT in general, and the WAN in particular.
