2020 was a year that changed the planet as we all know it. The global pandemic revolutionized our work lives as remote working. Became the norm and this trend is predicted to continue into the longer term. For communication service providers, the pandemic caused challenges but also opportunities for growth. Provided they’re cognizant of customer demand and use patterns and adjust two key success factors – scale and DDoS security.
Plainly, a return to pre-pandemic working practices is not likely to happen. The pandemic significantly raised awareness around the resiliency of the network and therefore the robustness of security. And going forward, subscribers and enterprises expect much stronger security from their communications service providers and can demand. More in their SLAs and expand to other sorts of cybersecurity providers to urge this commitment.
Increase in Customer Demand
Without a doubt, COVID-19 has had a big impact on 99 % of all Middle East respondents. Having experienced a rise in demand. There are tons of labor to be done by SPs within the Middle East as they lag behind their compatriots. In other markets in terms of scaling up the network infrastructure. In response to the growing demand for data and network bandwidth from customers.
Distributed Environment
99 percent of all of the Middle Eastern service provider respondents said that. COVID-19 has accelerated its transition to a more distributed environment. Middle Eastern communication service platform providers are seeing a surge in demand from multiple locations. And this has forced them to reorganize network capacity and proportion in specific locations.
Cybersecurity / DDoS Security Concerns
The analysis underlined the extent to that communications service providers are involved regarding DDoS attacks and therefore more mitigate them. Overall, it underlined that plenty of communications service providers are vulnerable. As a result of COVID-19, more are currently investing in security so on strengthen their defenses.
One of the large cybersecurity challenges caused by the pandemic with the ‘work from home. The scenario is that it’s caused a rapid expansion of the attack surface. 51 percent of Middle Eastern service providers have fastened investment plans in security and this is often a comparatively low figure. Considering security, primarily cybersecurity providers should be a priority for every service Cybersecurity provider.
They have said that they might need additional capabilities and technologies to guard their customers’ networks against cyber-attacks within the next two years. DDoS protection is a big concern.
It’s an irreversible proven fact that bi-directional DDoS attacks are surging in frequency and volume, severely impacting businesses across the world. defending architecture, servers, applications, and users’ access throughout DDoS attacks can’t be accomplished by simply existing firewalls, intrusion hindrance systems, and load balancers.
In fact, in many instances, these systems are the target of attacks because they’re vulnerable and may be overwhelmed by a flood of unwanted traffic. As communications service providers evolve with digital transformation and a cloud-native deployment model, they ought to prioritize applying more rigor to their security strategy — with up-to-date thinking and techniques — to address longstanding vulnerabilities.
The Impact of Pandemic on Relationships and Investment Plans
As per the report, it’s an assortment when it involves investment. For the center East, the bulk of respondents have planned to extend investment in security within the subsequent three years thanks to the rise in traffic/ subscribers (51%).
It is interesting that quite half the respondents within the Middle East decide to reduce investment in their own network and accelerate the use of public cloud providers, while others decide to increase investment in networks (43%).
In terms of future investment plans, going forward providers are keen to create certain DDoS security across the network infrastructure – solutions like DDoS and ransomware protection services for enterprise customers and upgrading firewalls and other security appliances feature heavily within the plans.
Concerns Around Outages, Compliance, and Multi-Cloud Environments
When it involves a range of environments, providers are concerned that they will still deliver an honest level of service, so outages are top of mind, followed by granular visibility of traffic. Not going far, the world has had 2 large outages which left adverse effects on reliability.