Mobile applications are evolving at a faster rate than network carriers can manage.
This means the demands of mobile applications in a connected culture is driving cloud computing, said Justin Lee, Juniper Networks territory manager for Africa, at the ITWeb Security Summit in Sandton, this week.
Lee indicated that social media and the growth of mobile applications have created a new economy for mobile service providers. This, he said, has driven the requirement for network and security expansion to support mobile applications and services.
“Mobile service providers are being forced to evolve their services to keep up with demand. People are starting to expect a wide range of choices in the services and applications they pay for and the only way the network can cope with this is by moving the services and applications into a cloud computing environment,” said Lee.
He added that the amount of new mobile applications has resulted in explosive growth in network traffic demand. “In 2009, there was 60 exabytes of data and 43 billion Google searches were carried out on a day-to-day basis. Most of it was done via users' mobile phones.
“In the mobile network carrier environment, most of their revenue today is derived from voice services. However, they are experiencing a 20% loss in revenue to keep up with data from growing applications. And if they don't change their business model, it will cost them more to keep a customer as competition heats up.”
Lee claimed the past three years have seen a 50% increase in data, and network providers need to deploy hardware to support these requirements and capacities.
“We've only seen the tip of the iceberg.” Lee explained that long-term evolution technology will enable mobile networks to supply Internet speeds of 100Mbps and access to information as well as the speed of information is increasing.
“Security investment is critical to protect the corporate network and applications and to ensure business continuity. Employees want to use personal smartphones and notebooks for work and play. IT departments are inundated with requests to support these devices and the security boundaries are changing constantly,” said Lee.
He added that one of the biggest challenges when managing applications is scalability. Lee said the answer lies in cloud computing by hosting application services, platform and infrastructure services.
“In the future, network companies will need to build more security for the cloud, because the problem of scalability is only going to get bigger.
“Cloud technologies provide a shared data centre that provides fast access and we are already seeing the likes of Google and IBM building these massive cloud networks.”
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