According to Leitch, enterprises demand easy access to company applications from remote sites and remote users, protection from intrusions/viruses/hackers/DDOS attacks, and easy manageability of both remote network access and security policies surrounding the network.

Security has always been a concern, but the complexity of applications and user access requirements has significantly increased the demand for a unified approach to security that can mitigate all risks but also be easily manageable.

Leitch has seen a rise in demand for unified threat management technologies and also secure remote access solutions. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) VPNs have been in high demand as many look to migrate or replace the older and resource hungry IPsec VPNs.

According to Hui at F5, SSL VPNs grew quickly in the first half year of 2006 due to the concerns of bird flu at the beginning of the year and the inconvenience of IPsec. "Now with less media focus on bird flu and many organizations implementing already rolling out SSL VPNs, we foresee a slower growth rate in the SSL VPN space next year," predicted Hui.

Ho at Nortel notes that network protection is now always a top consideration when planning and building networks. He added that vendors are adding embedding more security features in network switches. Deep packet inspection, firewalls, end point security and remote access functionality are common additions within network switches.