PURSES CLOSED
This year's results show a shift from 2007, when respondents who were willing to upgrade their network infrastructures slightly outnumbered those willing to add in-band appliances. This may be an indicator that recent infrastructure upgrades have been made, and most see no reason to do it again.
Still, even though respondents don't want to upgrade their infrastructures, they do recognize that they may not have a choice: Nearly half, 48%, indicate that between 10% and 50% of their infrastructures will need to be updated.
Notably, fully 79% of respond ents agree or strongly agree that their NAC systems should support 802.1X. While the spec has been ratified for a few years and new switches commonly have no problem with it, there's still a lot of older gear out there that doesn't support 802.1X or other new functionality, like Radius extensions for setting switch-port configurations. The reality is that upgrades, at least firmware and possibly hardware, will be required in many cases.
Respondents also are overwhelmingly concerned with the impact of NAC on network performance and reliability. Providing security without compromising the LAN ranked as the most important element of NAC (72%), with high availability in the NAC product (71%), not impacting latency (66%), not compromising network fault tolerance (65%), and easy integration with the infrastructure (65%) following behind.
Bottom line: Any technology, security related or not, that negatively affects network performance is a nonstarter.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
Maintaining existing network infrastructures often incurs huge technical debt before newer technologies are adopted over time.
Amid ongoing regional uncertainties, telecom infrastructure in the Middle East has expand to include terrestrial low-latency network infrastructure, which offers resilience and agility in navigating political complexities without relying solely on undersea networks.
