ACSM
Is today’s cyber security meeting CISO demands?”
By Guy Matthews, Editor of NetReporter
COVER FEATURE
T
he world of cybersecurity is akin to a giant iceberg – vast, complex, ever-changing, multi-faceted. Of its various facets, one in particular has the power to keep enterprise security professionals awake at night, and that’s the critical intersection that straddles the networking world and the cybersecurity world. This nexus is not only a major pressure point for the hard-pressed CISO, it is the object of much effort and investment in the security vendor community. It has also been the subject of much scrutiny on the part of Mauricio Sanchez, Research Director, Network Security & SASE/ SDWAN with independent research firm Dell’Oro Group. He visualises the market for network security as divided between product types that have been around for a while, and newer technologies designed to address more contemporary challenges: “In the former category we have things like firewalls, email security and secure web gateways,” he says. “Some of these are now delivered as platforms in the cloud. And on the application and delivery and security side, closer to the data center, are things like web application firewalls and application delivery controllers. Then bringing together enterprise networking and security we have SD-WAN and what I call the great convergence of SASE.” Sanchez sees a number of market forces and trends influencing developments in these areas, perhaps the most glaring being the pandemic: “We've seen a huge increase in incidents, whether that be ransomware or denial of service
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attacks,” he notes. “It seems that the hacker community is taking advantage of the current situation. I think hybrid work is a second market force that has resulted in an upheaval of enterprise IT and the rise of the remote workforce. Then there’s the shift to everything being online. The need to reach out to your customer with a digital experience has really motivated enterprises to up their game and invest, but in doing so they also open themselves up to a new set of security implications.” The cybersecurity landscape of last 20 years has, argues Sanchez, been a story of fragmentation. Now he sees evidence of some consolidation with large vendors getting larger and looking to grab the entire CISO cybersecurity spend. “Another phenomenon we have noted is a shift from hardware to cloud-delivered network security,” he says. “Moving on from an age of hub and spoke and hardware deployed at each physical point, we now have a new breed of security vendors delivering their value exclusively through the cloud. There is no hardware to buy, just a contract to sign and you're off to the races.” CR Srinivasan is Executive Vice President, Cloud & Security Business with global carrier brand Tata Communications, and has additional responsibility as the company’s Chief Information Security Officer and the Chief Information Officer. He has noted a number of large trends that are influencing the shape of the cybersecurity market: “There’s remote work, and virtual ‘work from anywhere’,”
