Data Center Summit – Learnings from the Road
Data Center Learnings from the Road
I just got back from our London Data Center Summit. We’ve had multiple data center events now in the U.S. and kicked off the international leg in London last week. At these data center summits, we address the evolution of the data center, data center networking changes and challenges, and finally the implications from a security perspective. I thought it would be interesting to share some of the learnings from the road. What are the top of mind issues from our data center audience?
A QA on Zero Trust
I mentioned in my last blog that we’re kicking off a Data Center Summit starting in Dallas, Texas today. One of the special guests at our seminar will be John Kindervag from Forrester Research, presenting on the Zero Trust Model. If you haven’t yet heard of Zero Trust, check out the video here.
With the current state of security attacks on organizations, this new security model, called “Zero Trust” recommends that enterprise take a new architectural approach to securing their networks. Kindervag’s model recommends trusting no one (not even internal users), ensuring secure access to all resources, and inspecting and logging all traffic among other things. He also introduces what he calls a network segmentation gateway or a “firewall on steroids” that does firewall, IPS, content filtering and encryption without a performance impact.
There has been lots written up on this Zero Trust model, but we really wanted to drill down on the actual implementation of the Zero Trust model, in particular in the data center. We spoke with John Kindervag, security analyst at Forrester to get his perspective:
How Secure Is Your Data Center?
I feel sorry for security IT admins these days. The enterprise network used to be relatively easy to protect; crunchy on the outside, chewy and soft in the middle. Protect the perimeters, and you were safe. Now that boundaries have disappeared, threats have evolved, and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become a reality, where should enterprises focus their security efforts?
I say the data center. Of course I subscribe to the notion of defense-in-depth, but if there is one place security should never be neglected, it’s where all your important servers and data reside.