LOS ANGELES — Security has dominated MEF 2019 as one of the most critical and pressing challenges for operators and vendors. The prevailing argument and hope here is that SD-WAN presents the industry with an opportunity to implement more robust and reliable network security.

“SD-WAN is the gateway for security,” MEF CTO Pascal Menezes said during his keynote today. “I can’t even emphasize how important it is, how security is top of mind for every CIO, CSO, CEO, IT shop.”

MEF unveiled the first standardized definition for SD-WAN (MEF-70) in August and by “early to mid next year we’ll have the first industry version for security of SD-WAN,” said Menezes. The standard will target all points of potential intrusion, including malware, the network edge, data loss, access control protection, bots in IoT environments, and broader points across the internet, according to Menezes.

MEF’s SD-WAN standard is based on behavior rather than technology specifications or protocol, and the association is likely to follow a similar framework for security on SD-WAN. With dozens of SD-WAN vendors in the market and most of them providing proprietary services, complexity has become a hurdle and threat to adoption.

Indeed, the top two threats facing the market, as reported in a new survey of 125 network operators by Heavy Reading, deal with the complexity of managing multi-vendor ecosystems and multi-cloud SD-WAN. “Clearly there’s a complexity problem within SD-WAN overall,” said Sterling Perrin, principal analyst at Heavy Reading.

Security is also top of mind for SD-WAN customers. Among the 47% of operators that have deployed SD-WAN, 40% have already implemented security on SD-WAN, which ranked second behind WAN transport deployments at 43%, according to the survey.

In a separate survey of 121 enterprise networking and IT managers conducted by Futuriom and presented at MEF 2019, 57% cited security as the prime benefit of SD-WAN, besting all other benefits of the technology.

As networks expand, reaching new places and things, the challenge of security is also growing exponentially, according to multiple executives at the event.

“The bad guys can set up shop anywhere in the world that the legal enforcement can’t get to. They can go to the dark web, get all the tools they need, build a business on cybercrime, and launch it while they’re sleeping,” Menezes warned. “Trillions and trillions of dollars are going to be lost through cybercrime … and businesses don’t know how to manage this. It’s almost to the point it’s epidemic.”

While that dire outlook is reinforced at a steady clip, it’s not all bad news for network operators and SD-WAN providers, Menezes argued. “It’s a huge opportunity for our membership to deliver managed security offerings and I believe SD-WAN is the way to deliver that. With the virtualization of SD-WAN and the virtualization of security functions, it’s very powerful,” he said.

During her keynote, Suzanne Galvanek, VP of enterprise networking at AT&T Business, said the cumulative annual cost of cybersecurity breaches is estimated to eclipse $6 trillion by 2021 and businesses collectively spent $114 billion on threat mitigation last year.

“That is staggering,” she said. “Something seems off there. We’re spending $114 billion on threat mitigation and yet by 2021 it’s going to cost us $6 trillion dollars for breaches. The system is broken and we understand this concern that our customers have.”

In a bid to overcome this challenge AT&T is focusing on network visibility — the ability to anticipate and act on the threats that are being posed in this environment, Galvanek said. “The roadmap for AT&T Cybersecurity seeks to address these challenges by embedding security controls into our network architecture.”

She didn’t discuss network security in the context of SD-WAN, but in a separate keynote her colleague Josh Goodell, VP of edge solutions at AT&T Business, named SD-WAN security as one of three big themes and areas of emphasis for the coming year.

“It’s amazing how smart the bad guys are,” Menezes said. “The servers that you visit today. The ones you trust that are legitimate are also infected because they don’t apply the right security postures in front of it.”

MEF CTO Pascal Menezes discusses the importance of security in SD-WAN during his keynote at MEF 2019.