Ah, the romance of the railroad. Conductors shouting “all aboard”, watching the countryside whizz by, dining cars and sleeper cars, boxcars, the Orient Express, bullet trains, chasm-spanning bridges, the clickety clack of the rails, clang clang at the crossings, and the engineer waving from the caboose. As we near the two hundred year mark of the first passenger train in 1825, we can observe that railways, our oldest modern means of mass transportation, are as strong as ever.

With hybrid work environments on the rise, enterprise networks are dealing with multiple remote connections, increasing the risk of breaches and other attacks. One way to mitigate these risks is by implementing Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) into the enterprise network. Unfortunately however this does not address the full set of threats to the enterprise, as many of the zero-trust service providers and on-premises network solutions do not address the voice network.

The major challenge facing communications service providers (CSPs) is not about handling ever-growing bandwidth demands without increasing Capex. Smart selection of network technologies that leverage advances in aggregating, routing, and transmitting bits largely have the answer for that. The much more pressing challenge is on the services front, from competition, substitution, and the inability to maximize revenues. These concerns reduce the top line and restrict CSPs’ ability to maneuver.