Cisco is said to have been involved in the construction of almost all of China's large-scale network projects, involving the construction of networks in key sectors such as government, customs, postal services, finance, railroads, civil aviation, health care, military and police, as well as the network infrastructure of telecommunications carriers such as China Telecom and China Unicom. China Telecom 163 and China Unicom 169 are the two most important backbone networks in China, both carrying more than 80% of China's Internet traffic. But in these two backbone networks, Cisco occupies more than 70% of the share and holds all the super core nodes.
Yet Cisco is the main supplier of communications equipment and network technology equipment to the U.S. government and military. Cisco was one of the key architects of a "Cyber Storm" cyberwarfare exercise that involved 115 U.S. government departments in 2006. Therefore, security experts are concerned that once war breaks out, the U.S. government is very likely to use Cisco's globally deployed products to launch a cyber war and carry out a fatal blow to the enemy country.
Some subtle moves by China's communications carriers may reflect that concern. Last October, China Unicom completed the relocation project of the core cluster routers in the Jiangsu Wuxi node of the 169 backbone network, the first Cisco cluster router relocation project in the communications industry. This is likely to be a landmark event, indicating that China's communications companies have begun to face up to the problem of information security, and began to embark on the replacement of existing network equipment.
Just as Cisco was embroiled in the "Prism Gate" incident, market research firm SynergyResearchGroup released data showing that Cisco has beaten Hewlett-Packard and IBM to become the largest provider of IT products in the cloud computing market. Cisco's annual revenue in the Chinese market has exceeded 1.6 billion U.S. dollars, accounting for 30% of the company's total profits. It can be expected that the "Prism Gate" incident may make its business in China suffered a serious setback. In addition to Cisco, it is expected that Microsoft, Apple and other companies in China business will also be affected to some extent.
In fact, when the U.S. blocked Huawei and ZTE last year, security experts have been calling on the government to pay attention to China's network security. Therefore, I believe that in the rise of cloud computing and big data, the country has become more and more attention to network information security, "Prism Gate" incident is a greater warning, perhaps the next China will be on the network security legislation, the government, central enterprises, the military and other procurement of localization to make explicit provisions.
From the point of view of the technical reserves of enterprises, China's current level of communications technology has reached the world level, and local enterprises have the ability to carry the full construction of the network and security operations. Therefore, the upgraded national information security strategy will not only be good for Huawei, ZTE and other communications equipment vendors, but will also broadly benefit many companies involved in cloud computing and big data.
For example, the upcoming cloud computing standards will likely pay more attention to security issues, which will enable local hardware and software production, system integration, and cloud computing platform providers to usher in more space for development.
Similarly, the construction and maintenance of data centers, data processing, voice recognition, IT consulting, information security and other enterprises in the big data area will also usher in huge business opportunities.