As Cisco Live comes to a close, the buzz about the future of networking is only growing in intensity.

Throughout the conference, several products, trends, and partnerships were announced that have been in the works.

Here are some of the key takeaways we learned this year:

1. Networking of tomorrow

2016 marched to the tech drum as the number of machine-to-machine network activations surpassed those of phones and tablets combined! At the current pace connected devices are running for new business models and those connected to the Internet are established to increase substantially. The standing prediction is 1M connections being added to the network each hour of the day on average by 2018.

2. Multi-cloud reality

“This is a major challenge we have to solve. It’s not going to the cloud. It’s going to many, many clouds and the network has a unique ability to help you navigate that by preserving your policy and your security.”

Chuck Robbins

CEO, Cisco

Cloud computing originated from the need to simplify an already complex enterprise IT. Due to a shift in utilizing the cloud whether it be private, community, or hybrid based, companies are now buying into a multitude of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings.

To continue moving forward in this fast pace industry adopting cloud services is the step to take. However, the diversity of cloud operation is only opening more doors to problems dealing with data control and security.

• How do we simplify supporting a greater scale of devices much faster than today?
• How can we secure connectivity across numerous clouds at the same time?

3. Security

Today, security is front and center in our industry’s conversations and as we add more and more things to the list of technological opportunities, the pool of threats expands. We’ve seen it play out over and over again in the news: something major happens about once a month that involves security breaches or updates. Luckily, new traffic analytics are being developed and maturing to meticulously detect threats in encrypted traffic more than 99 percent of the time without the need to decrypt the data.

To address this dire need for security, Apple and Cisco partnership announced the Cisco Security Network, the first ever security application for iOS that will be driven by three main gears: visibility, control, and privacy.

To read more about security vulnerabilities your enterprise cannot afford to ignore going forward, click here to read about a $38 billion security vulnerability.

Where the network and industry are heading

“The winners in this new data economy are gonna be defined by the folks who have the best data and can drive the most insight on that data, and then connect it back to action. That’s what’s going to define the winners and losers of the future.”

Rowan Trollope

SVP & GM – Internet of Things (IoT) and Applications Division, Cisco

As addressed by Chuck Robbins and several other keynote speakers, the focal point of the next generation’s technology will be based on 3 core fundamentals: scalability, complexity, and security. These ideas will be the building blocks for the structure of future tech. To begin the evolution of tomorrow, we will be turning to big data to determine the highest priorities and best approaches to advance our movement in development.

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