18
MANAGEMENT
November 2017
Feel empowered with
software-defined security
by steve christian
Steve Christian
is senior
vice-president,
marketing at
Verimatrix.
Secure
Cloud
underpins
Verimatrix’s
strategy for
the Internet
of Things
(IoT), which
represents
a potentially
lucrative
new market
for many
pay-TV and
broadband
operators.
Cloudification continues to be
one of the major trends for 2017
with ample confirmation of these
infrastructure moves from the market
and our customers. As competition
to acquire and retain subscribers
grows, the costs and complexity to
operate advanced on-premise video
and content security headends is
also increasing. Together, they pose
formidable challenges for pay-TV
operators. The bottom line is this:
Operators are looking for competitive
advantage and increased agility so
that new features and service options
can be brought to market far faster
than in the past.
In this context, leveraging cloud-
based services, and more specifically
cloud-centric service subsystems, is
another major step towards software
empowerment and virtualisation of
the video infrastructure. We have
been talking about this industry
theme for a couple of years now,
tracking the way that operators are
evaluating the relocation of their
principal ecosystem components,
including encoding, security and even
set-top box functionality to virtual
environments and onwards to the
cloud.
For instance, the hardware-
based, client-centric, connectionless
operational approach that dictated
prior generations of security offerings
is gradually becoming irrelevant. The
new generati