Cyber Security
Rapidly evolving trends in cloud networking security and cloud-native security
O By Scott Raynovich, Principal Analyst, Futuriom
ur sense of security is deeply ingrained. For centuries we understood that, if a house has doors, you lock them. So, if your business network has an entry point, you install a firewall. But BYOD, wireless connectivity, and cloud applications have exploded the number of entry points. In today’s connected world, every single device or application expands the attack surface. If the network periphery goes fractal, where do you put security? The cloud has changed everything on the network. It's changed traffic patterns, behaviours, and network architectures. Shortly, if not now, the bulk of enterprise traffic exiting the LAN will be heading for the cloud. It used to be a self-contained world of a corporate LAN or WAN. This is creating more bandwidth demand and it requires a more flexible architecture. You can't just install a firewall – you have to have security apps distributed wherever your users are going. Kevin Deierling is Senior VP of Marketing, Mellanox Technologies and he sees the same problem: “They used to say ‘secure the network against attacks from outside’,
26 | Australian Cyber Security Magazine
but more and more in the cloud model they're coming from inside – because the cloud model invites third parties that are potentially untrusted right into the middle of your datacentre. So, that old security model of perimeter protection is not adequate. It's still important, but it's not adequate”. Another rising challenge is appliance sprawl. Enterprises have racked and stacked appliances for a variety of networking applications that should be native to the network itself. In the beginning, there were a few internal switches and then a router to connect with the outside world. Now there hundreds of different kinds of devices with different characteristics and different protocols, ranging from WAN optimization to application delivery control. It's going up the stack into the software layer: we have orchestration tools and visibility tools and so on. These are the things that network and IT managers are struggling with. The way that the enterprise is interacting with the cloud is now changing the game. This has a vital bearing on security policy: is it MPLS or Internet? Private cloud or public cloud? Is the end users coming from a private MPLS
