"While many firms are looking for additional high performance, it's clear they also want better network visibility and management capabilities too," said Gao.

Security technologies are constantly being piled up at the perimeter to block out external threats, companies are now starting to focus on internal security issues, noted Gao. "Internal network control is a big area right now for large enterprises as internal security controls have yet to be fully developed," he said.

Functions like network access control (NAC) and end-user device management are likely future battlegrounds for networking providers.

Gao said that users now want to identify, scan and authorize every device that accesses the network, and such functions are being built into fixed and wireless switches. Network traffic monitoring is also being demanded with an increasing need to be able to identify traffic abnormalities and performance bursts. On the back of this, networks must also be more flexible in order to deal with these occurrences in an automated fashion, as well as ensure that security is maintained at all times.

Charleston Sin, general manager of Hong Kong and Macau for Cisco, also noted the rising network requirements in Hong Kong. "Bandwidth upgrades are evident and also the diversity of needs is growing with distributed networks high on the agenda-possibly driven by expansion to China," he said.