Telco operators and service providers in Saudi Arabia are under pressure to do two things — one is to respond faster to market innovations and user demand and specifically around differentiation.

Today, as the average revenue per subscriber from voice is declining, service providers have to rely on more innovative services in the data space and bundling offers to be able to attract more subscribers.

The other area is the increased user demand for bandwidth and applications, which is forcing SPs to upgrade their networks and data centers. With declining budgets and margins, they have to do something different to maintain profitability and cut costs.

They are finding private cloud and software defined networks (SDN) to be the answer and are embarking on a journey to centralize and consolidate services.

They have begun to adopt server virtualization, SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) technologies to reduce footprint of their architectures & networks

One of the major advantages of deploying SDN is that the management of all systems within the network has a centralized controller. This single plane of control acts as a decision point for the whole network as access can be granted to all equipment in the network, easing and speeding up the management process.

Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade, says by centralizing the control however, you also create a significant target for any malicious activity. For telecom operators, making sure that this central controller plane isn’t comprised therefore needs to be a top priority. Without sufficient protection, the controllers could be compromised, which would pose a significant threat to the network and the data being interacted with it.

Secondly, SDN poses challenge in terms of the roots of trust (RoT) that are used to validate control signals within the network.