With 2018 just around the corner, Carousel experts have been ruminating about what’s in store for 2018. Here are what some of our top minds said about what IT leaders should expect in the next 12 months.

Darryl Senese, VP, Carrier Services

SD-WAN. It’s really a game changer, allowing IT leaders to do different things with their network, reduce cost, get better visibility into how their network works and how they’re routing traffic. And it’s just really exciting.

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Jason Viera, Senior Director, Infrastructure Solutions

For so long in the networking space, it was all about SDN in the data center. Most of these solutions have since pivoted to security and seen slow and steady adoption. Now, SD-WAN is here, solving real business problems across market segments and we’re seeing good traction in actual, real-world SD-WAN deployments. While marketeers will hail 2018 as the year of the Intent-Based Networking, SD-WAN will be the big draw.

Jason Albuquerque, CISO

It’s cyber awareness. That’s the key piece, right? Our people are our first line of defense. Because of this, it’s important to educate staff to ensure they’re aware of the latest threats out there to create this culture of cyber security throughout our businesses.

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Kevin McCarron, VP, Collaboration

In practically every vertical, there’s some sort of digital transformation initiative. For instance, banks. Less people are going to tellers, less people are wanting to make phone calls for customer service; they want to be able to text and they want to be able to do anything and everything on their app for banking.

Another vertical is higher ed. Admissions to college and universities is far more sophisticated than when I went to college, that’s for sure, and they’re getting very sophisticated in how they address the needs of both potential students and compete for potential students. They can track analytics and tie it together with CRM, or if it’s a health care organization they can tie it in with electronic medical records, all those sorts of things.