It found that, nearly all (99%) of service providers surveyed had experienced an increase in demand as a result of COVID-19. 67% of service providers surveyed believe their customers will continue to operate with employees working from home to some extent post-pandemic. As a result, they anticipate permanent changes to customer demand and use patterns.

Last year was a busy year for both attackers and hackers as well as cybersecurity personnel defending against the plethora of attacks to which they were subjected. With an election year in the United States in 2020, we saw a rise in anti-government cyber activities, a prominent example of which was the attack on FireEye.

Service providers and many other organizations are aggressively expanding and securing infrastructure to deal with the demands and safeguard against threats to ensure reliable service and business-critical subscriber growth.

As the world focuses on the growing list of organizations that have been compromised, there’s also a growing list of those that believe they’re ok. Many have taken the approach that if they are not running SolarWinds, or a particular version of it, then they can go back to business as usual.

Mobile operators also see rapid adoption of 5G over the next three years by subscribers as 5G deployment accelerates. Most operators said that within five years, at least 25 percent of their traffic would be carried via 5G – with 40 percent of operators predicting that most of their traffic would be carried by 5G.