Author Archives: Zeus Kerravala

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. 

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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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The Internet of Things (IoT) is heating up and will be a hot trend in 2017. And Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, plans to be a part of it. 

The company has been active in the IoT industry by providing Wi-Fi connectivity to IoT endpoints and security through its ClearPass product. However, it has never put together a comprehensive IoT story that spans its portfolio.

Last week at the HPE Discover Conference, though, Aruba announced several new products to position itself as a strong IoT enabler. The new solutions include security tools, wired switches and new partnerships.

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What separates a great Major League Baseball hitter like David Ortiz from some run-of-the mill player? Great eyesight and intelligence. Ortiz sees more than others and takes all of the rich information he sees to make an intelligent, actionable decision to swing a baseball or not. While lots of players claim to do this, only a few have the right combination of the two to separate themselves from the field. 

The same thing can be said for IT security. It takes visibility across the entire attack spectrum, plus analytics and real-world insight, to provide actionable threat intelligence. Many vendors claim to have threat intelligence, but they operate by looking for anomalies in the network to flag something that might be a breach. This can be valuable, but it addresses only part of the security continuum. 

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We’ve probably all used the phrase “too much of anything is a bad thing.” Too much ice cream makes you fat, too many cats and you get called crazy, and too much NFL football on Sunday gets you banned to the doghouse by your wife. 

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In IT, too much network traffic is certainly a bad thing. We need networks and rely on them to access cloud applications, call people on via videoconferencing and do a whole bunch of other tasks. However, too much traffic and the network becomes unusable and a source of frustration for workers. 

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The digital business era has brought with it a number of new tools and technologies, such as software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and the cloud. These innovations enable businesses to increase their level of dynamism and be more distributed, but they also increase the complexity of securing the business. Old-school security methods and tools do not work in an environment where the perimeter is eroding and resources are becoming more virtual and cloud-centric.

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To combat this, security professionals have embraced the concept of segmentation. The number of segmentation providers has exploded over the past few years, including VMware repositioning its NSX network virtualization product as a micro-segmentation solution. 

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A decade ago, security meant a big firewall at a single ingress point.  All devices and applications were under IT’s tight control, so they did not create significant security risks. 

 Today, everything has changed.  The rise of cloud computing, BYOD, shadow IT, WiFi devices, software defined everything and other trends have blown up the tightly controlled model and created a rather chaotic system. 

Adding to the challenge is that attackers are getting smarter and targeting IoT systems and end users directly, which often bypasses the security technology.  This is why some security experts say there are two types of organizations, those that have been breached and know about it and those that have been breached and don’t know about it. 

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Last week the Enterprise Connect trade show was held in Orlando, Florida. The show is the collaboration industry’s largest event and because of that, there were dozens of vendors that issued press releases touting the latest and greatest innovations in the market.

One announcement that I thought flew under the radar was Cisco’s intent to acquire privately held Synata. Jim Duffy wrote a short article covering the news but the importance of this acquisition hasn’t been discussed.

Explaining what Syanta does is fairly simple. It lets user search encrypted files and messages, even if they’re stored in cloud storage drives. Cisco will use this technology to enhance its team-messaging product, Cisco Spark.

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