Now we are four, but mature for our years

NFV has grown up fast and has a maturity that belies it's short four-year lifespan to date. As Don Clarke explains, the focus has now moved away from various iterations of proofs of the concept of NFV technology and on to the nitty-gritty of deploying NFV in real-world networks. Significant work has been done on NFV architecture and interfaces and now the spotlight is on NFV licence management, an area that will level the playing field for the community of smaller vendors who, hitherto, have been overshadowed by the big boys. Don Clarke adds that security in NFV and SDN remains a challenge and is an area that is receiving a great deal of attention and a multitude of inputs from the ecosystem and community. Security remains a work-in-progress but it is an area of enormous opportunity as it will combine analytics with the network agility  that NFV and SDN can provide to improve the resilience of networks to a myriad of security threats.