The use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is both a technological and social revolution. For the first time, in 2012, more tablets and smartphones were purchased than personal computers, and thanks to the bring your own device (BYOD) trend, it is now more commonly acceptable for business employees to use their personal mobile devices for work purposes.

These devices consume data-intensive rich media such as video, web, and social media and present a variety of security and performance challenges for network teams. More than half of IT organizations now support BYOD policies in their organizations, and that number will grow quickly.

Cloud services and virtualization are closely related megatrends. Effective cloud delivery, whether provided by a third party or managed internally, depends on virtualization to yield its full benefits. Together, they offer major improvements in economy and efficiency. They also add complexity to network management.

Because of the potential benefits, virtualized applications account for more than 50 percent of server workloads today. New virtual machines are being created at the rate of one every 6 – 8 seconds, and all of them require IP addresses.

As for cloud, 60 percent of all enterprises have some sort of cloud adoption, 52 percent of organizations we surveyed in 2012 had deployed private clouds, 36 percent of those were running tier-1 applications, and 11 percent more were planning to deploy private cloud in the next 6 months.

Consolidation is a major trend in the modernization and restructuring of enterprise IT infrastructures. It simplifies management and reduces overhead. But it also brings massive changes to IT network topologies. Companies that are reimagining their networks must consider how they’re going to control them in a way that will propel them forward. New architectures are ushering in new networking paradigms like Software Defined Networking (SDN).

SDN is a networking trend still in its infancy—but has the potential to have the most profound and disruptive impact on how we design, build, and run networks in the foreseeable future. SDN’s key idea is to de-couple the network control plane from the data plane and introduce the notion of network programmability and virtualization—with the goal of dramatically driving up agility and flexibility and driving down costs associated with proprietary networking gear.

Version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) has been a nice-to-have for more than a decade. As the supply of IPv4 addresses rapidly depletes, transition to IPv6 is now all but essential. New technologies are fueling a dramatic increase in network IP endpoints. Analysts estimate between 30 – 50 percent compound annual growth rate in the machine-to-machine network, which will have a massive impact on IP address demand, connecting everything in a diverse range of devices like HVAC systems, highway sensors, or patient-monitoring equipment.

Unlike IPv4, traditional manual IP address management won’t be sufficient for IPv6, which is made up of 32 hex digits and not easily readable by humans. Automation is the only way to ensure error-free IPv6 management.

The volume of major data breaches is on the rise, and every new threat has the potential to compromise millions upon millions of records. Most breaches are driven by new generations of malware that creep onto the network undeterred by traditional firewalls. Left undetected and unchecked, malware can fester for months—until it’s too late to limit its spread. In the era of zero-day attacks, advanced persistent threats, and new threat vectors, your network needs a security approach that combats malware at its core, finding and disabling it in a robust, timely, and proactive manner—before it wreaks havoc on your network.