Author Archives: Zeus Kerravala

The industry’s largest collaboration show, Enterprise Connect, gets underway this week in Orlando, Florida. The show has become the place for vendors to show off the latest and greatest, and the week started off with Cisco announcing some new products and updates to existing ones. 

Cisco’s collaboration business has been on quite a roll of late, as it has released a number of new solutions, including the game-changing Spark Board, which was unveiled earlier this year. 

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Earlier this year Fortinet hired its first chief information security officer (CISO). The timing makes sense, as the company has grown into a leading security vendor with an integrated, security fabric vision that few competitors can match.

As Fortinet continues to expand its presence in the federal and critical infrastructure markets, CISO Philip Quade brings the credentials and background needed to help lead the strategy. Prior to joining Fortinet, Quade was the NSA director’s special assistant for cyber and chief of the NSA Cyber Task Force. Before that, he was chief operating officer of the Information Assurance Directorate at the NSA.

I recently talked with Quade regarding his new role and the challenges the United States and businesses in general face with respect to security.

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Deception tools have been growing in popularity over the past several years, but customers need to ensure they are using the technology to its fullest potential. 

The concept behind deception is fairly simple to understand: Security teams deploy a fake target that is monitored closely, which hackers will attack. Once the target is breached, the security team is alerted to the threat. 

In my experience, the use of deception technology is relatively low compared to the amount of time, energy and money invested in traditional intrusion prevention systems. Part of the challenge of deception is that maintaining things such as decoys, breadcrumbs and honeypots can be difficult in environments that are always changing. However, networks are becoming more agile through the use of software, making deception technology more agile and easier to use. 

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The European edition of Cisco Live took place this week in Berlin, which is a fitting location given the amount of innovation happening in that city right now. If you ever find yourself in Berlin, be sure to check out Cisco’s Open Berlin innovation center where inventive start-ups are building and showcasing solutions that run on Cisco technology.

Innovation and digital transformation are linked together like Kirk and Spock. You can’t have one without the other. At this week’s event, Ruba Borno, Cisco vice president of growth initiatives and chief of staff for the office of the CEO, gave her first-ever keynote to a Cisco Live audience. Not surprisingly, she focused on digital transformation. However, unlike many keynotes I have seen, Borno didn’t just talk about digitization at a high level. Instead she was more prescriptive and gave the audience a guide on how to proceed with making the shift to a digital enterprise. 

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The European edition of Cisco Live took place this week in Berlin, which is a fitting location given the amount of innovation happening in that city right now. If you ever find yourself in Berlin, be sure to check out Cisco’s Open Berlin innovation center where inventive start-ups are building and showcasing solutions that run on Cisco technology.

Innovation and digital transformation are linked together like Kirk and Spock. You can’t have one without the other. At this week’s event, Ruba Borno, Cisco vice president of growth initiatives and chief of staff for the office of the CEO, gave her first-ever keynote to a Cisco Live audience. Not surprisingly, she focused on digital transformation. However, unlike many keynotes I have seen, Borno didn’t just talk about digitization at a high level. Instead she was more prescriptive and gave the audience a guide on how to proceed with making the shift to a digital enterprise. 

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is hitting a tipping point. While there has been a fair amount of IoT chatter and hype over the past few years, deployments have been limited to the traditional machine to machine (M2M) verticals such as oil and gas, mining and manufacturing. Over the past couple of years, though, more verticals have been looking to connect more non-traditional IoT devices.

The reason I think we’re at this tipping point is because businesses aren’t referring to these deployments as “IoT” but rather it’s becoming normal operations to connect more and more devices. 

+ Also on Network World: The Internet of Things security threat +

Healthcare has rapidly been connecting patient devices, retailers are making point-of-sale systems “smart,” hotels are looking to improve the guest experience, and sports and entertainment venues are connecting more devices. While these verticals may seem different, the commonality of IoT initiatives is that when everything is connected, you can change the way the business interacts with customers, students, patients, patrons, employees or other constituents that interact with the organization. 

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The middle of last year, Cisco held an event in New York to release its newest product, Tetration. The product moved Cisco into the analytics market, with the information being used to help customers better understand application performance and improve data center security. 

This week, Cisco announced the next version of Tetration Analytics, which is focused at providing security at the application layer. Cisco also released some new deployment options to make it easier for customers to get started with Tetration. 

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Data centers have become increasingly dynamic and distributed, which is why there has been a rise in technologies such as virtual machines, containers and hyperconverged systems.

Security has been slow to evolve to meet the needs of the new world, but thanks to innovative start-ups such as Illumio, security is starting to change and is able to meet the demands of digital organizations. 

One of the big advancements in data center security has been the rise of segmentation tools. In actuality, coarse-grained segmentation has been around for decades in the form of firewalls, VLANs and ACLs, but companies like Illumio and VMware have extended the paradigm to applications, workloads and users. 

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‘Tis the season to be jolly, they say, which is true unless you’re involved with enterprise security. 

For those individuals, tis the season to be wary as the number of highly publicized breaches continues to grow, as does the complexity of trying adequately secure the business. 

One of the biggest challenges is the vendor landscape has exploded with hundreds of point products. In fact, the 2016 ZK Research Security Survey found that large enterprises have an average of 32 security vendors deployed. 

+ Also on Network World: What to expect from Cisco in 2017 +

More security vendors doesn’t make companies more secure. It just makes things more complex. Despite the number of point products, finding a breach still takes well over 100 days. Think of the damage that can happen in over three months. A persistent threat can make its way around the company network, map out the whole environment and provide a blueprint for hackers to take whatever data they want. 

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