In a series of predictions for 2016 Mikko Disini, director Product Marketing at Citrix, examines the pace of change in network functions virtualisation (NFV), security and mobile payments.
Mobile Payments
The adoption of mobile payment technology will continue to increase, following the success of Apple Pay and numerous digital wallet technologies.
In some parts of the world, such as Japan, mobile payments are in heavy use already, with people relying on their phones to pay for travel, food, coffee, groceries and more.
Worldpay, a payment processing company, forecasts that C2B payments will be made most commonly through digital wallets by 2019.
We predict that mobile will grow to account for a third of C2B transactions in 2016, and with this growth the robustness of mobile payment servers will need to be re-evaluated.
NFV
This year will mark the beginning of a multi-year roll out of NFV, as the early adopters move beyond proof of concept and into full wide-scale deployment.
- In 2015, there has been much discussion around the transition to NFV, and how operators can deploy it in existing networks. We’ve seen product launches, proof of concepts (POCs) and industry partnerships as the market matures.
- In 2016 we’ll see some operators at the bleeding edge that have completed several POCs move into the detailed planning stage and start issuing RFPs for multi-year deployments.
- Other operators are postponing the move to NFV as they have a lot of existing capacity for growth in their networks, so will continue to build out physical appliances. These operators will be watching the early movers to NFV with interest, but will be looking three or so years ahead before they make the move.
- In between, there are operators with older technologies for which NFV is the natural upgrade, and which will start looking at trials next year. Likewise, the more greenfield operators that are leapfrogging previous technologies will move straight to NFV.
- In 2016, challenges will remain but the industry will move to address them – for example, openness in the variety of interfaces needed to make technologies compatible; and balancing the ROI that can be gained through operational cost savings and speed to market of services versus the upfront investment of time, resource and cost to deploy NFV.
- We’re seeing the blurring of development operations teams and the need for them to work hand in hand to build out apps quickly and an in agile way, so that operators can iterate quickly for applications, in a matter of weeks – this is known as devops. A major challenge that we’ll see continue to play out in 2016 is telcos competing with the OTT players that use the devops cycle, and being able to innovate fast enough. Operator organisations, typically siloed, do not lend themselves naturally to the devops methodology.
- Furthermore, in 2016 operators will continue to build out the skill sets needed for NFV, hiring from web-scale companies and cloud providers.
- NFV is not a solution in and of itself – operators need to adjust the mind-set, skillset and structure of organisation to be able to take advantage of the agility and flexibility that NFV will bring.
- In 2016 operators will look to vendors that have experience in and capabilities for devops environments to support them to leverage the power of cloud, and to rapidly and continuously integrate code to deliver new services.
Security
The proliferation of personal data stored on mobile devices means that traditional security measures need to be re-evaluated in 2016.
- As applications and services increase in volume, performance and richness of features, people are increasingly entering personal data onto their devices, and the chance of this data being compromised is growing in parallel to this trend, as data entry forms become entry points for malicious attacks.
- The mobile industry will look to establish a set of security protocols, as well as defined roles in terms of who is responsible for securing certain aspects of the mobile ecosystem.
- Web application firewall technology will be crucial to securing personal data.
- As a result of inconsistent security measures, we may see more high-profile cyber security attacks aimed at enterprises in 2016.
The author of this blog is Mikko Disini, director Product Marketing at Citrix.
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