Today's complex networks are being exploited by hackers and leading to more cyberattacks, according to SDxCentral’s 2016 Next-gen Infrastructure Security Report.

The report says that because these networks contain a mix of encrypted traffic, virtualized services and apps, and use cloud platforms, attackers are able to hack these environments undetected.

Virtualized Networks Top Security Issues Chart

While the switch to virtualized computing and cloud technologies has positively impacted organizations’ ability to oversee and protect their data, these benefits have simultaneously made these organizations more vulnerable to attackers by opening up additional attack routes among these virtualized resources, the report says.

When examining lost productivity, lost revenue and damage to reputations, the cost of global cyber espionage is about $500 billion annually and $1 trillion if including stolen intellectual property.

According to an SDxCentral survey done in conjunction with the report, the types of security threats continue to evolve, with data privacy and security being respondents’ top concern, followed by application security and securing cloud environments. Industry watcher Hackmageddon analyzed the top attack techniques used in 2015 and found that nearly a quarter of them were unknown, making them harder to identify and defend against. Other methods include SQLi, defacement, targeted attack, DDOS, account hijacking, and others.

With little surprise, there has been a demand for greater cybersecurity, which has driven this market’s worth to an estimated $75 to $100 billion, depending on how you define it, according to several technology market research firms.

Taking a software-defined anything (SDx) approach to security can be helpful because, according to the report, almost every security function can be delivered in software. It says that when security is delivered via software, it can be adapted to changing needs and can provide coverage across environments including on-premises deployments, private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Even though SDx security can improve the ability to track and control activity across cloud environments, visibility into the underlying mechanics of the network may be abstracted, and what was once a network security problem may really be a software-as-a-service (SaaS) issue, the report says.

Because of this, cybersecurity software needs to be intuitive for all users and embedded everywhere to ensure consistent and effective policy protection.