Cisco chief predicts a 'security nightmare'

Cisco chief executive John Chambers has predicted that personal and business lives will blur due to devices being able to access any kind of content at any time.

At an RSA conference keynote he also said that mobility would become a way of life as people could communicate wired or wireless from any device in the world.

He also said that more than 70 billion devices would be connected to the internet in the next three to five years.

Chambers said that devices monitoring traffic flow and collecting data would run at faster and faster speeds, and become part of the "way of life".

He said that devices would not traffic one of data, voice and video, but all of them across a combination of networks.

Chambers also said that businesses would change the way they collaborated internally and externally. "In every Cisco employee meeting, where I could be in Bangalore with 300 people in the room, we can collaborate to 17,000 people using collaborative tools like WebEx, IPTV or telepresence systems."

He went on to say that the integration of data, voice and video would have serious implications for security, as it would have to deal with protecting all three at the same time, rather than each by itself.

Cloud computing and virtualisation were also big factors in the future.

Chambers said it was an exciting time for Cisco as a network player but warned: "It is a security nightmare, and can't be handled in a traditional way."

Cisco recently announced new network security products to protect business web-based software and services from attack.