7 Layers: Security, SASE, Private 5G Top SDxCentral Ecosystem Topics in 2022

The SDxCentral ecosystem witnessed significant change in 2022, highlighted by ongoing cybersecurity attacks, the proliferation of new networking technologies, and industry changing merger and acquisition activity. Basically, another year at the office. The SDxCentral editorial staff sat down before the year ticked over to discuss what they found to be the biggest news and trends across their respective beats in 2022. While the sound quality might indicate that conversation was secretly recorded, rest assured we all knew what was up. Reporter Tommy Clift led off, touching on the rapid perception evolution blockchain technology went through in 2022, moving away from its association with the troubling cryptocurrency space to being used in commercial situations by established telecommunication players. Editor Nancy Liu had an exceptionally busy year covering the cybersecurity space for SDxCentral. Liu touched on near non-stop cyberattacks that hit some of the industry’s biggest names, including Uber, Microsoft, Okta, and Cisco. These attacks also targeted soft targets like city governments and school districts. Liu also highlighted the ongoing adoption of zero-trust network access (ZTNA) platforms that overtook rival cybersecurity acronyms for buzz in 2022. This was helped by the late-year push by the White House to deploy ZTNA principles across government agencies. Reporter Emma Chervek hit on the ongoing developer talent shortage challenge facing the software and cloud ecosystem, which remains a challenge in this post-pandemic environment. Chervek noted this challenge led to increased attention for low-code and no-code platforms designed to lower the barrier for application development. SDxCentral Editorial Assistant Julia King injected some sassy commentary on the secure access service edge (SASE), which continued to grow in 2022. The SASE space hit a level of maturity that has vendors now looking to differentiate through all-inclusive offerings instead of past partnerships, which itself could lead to greater industry consolidation in 2023. And finally, Executive Editor Dan Meyer touched on the surging attention placed on private networks, which vendors and operators think could prove a compelling 5G enterprise use case. More ominously, Meyer noted Broadcom’s pending $69 billion acquisition of VMware could cause significant ripples across the cloud and virtualization space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices