Enterprise IT is in the journey of rediscovering itself in the midst of several transformations happening simultaneously.
- Enterprise users are consuming more GenAI applications and services.
- Cloud-native SaaS have become core business applications.
- Users have embraced hybrid culture of work-from-anywhere.
- Application hosting and deployment models have shifted from on-prem to IaaS clouds and distributed micro-services.
With all these changes, it is obvious that enterprise IT is finding new ways of supporting their business and their users in a better and more effective way.
Access and Network Security is one of the core pillars of the new IT that has gone through tremendous changes in the last few years. Enterprises are moving away from the extreme of hardware-based self-managed products to a cloud-native, consumption-based as-a-service model where the service is ubiquitously available on global scale. In this process, enterprises are replacing products like VPNs, SD-WAN user appliances, hardware Firewalls and ADCs with more innovative and cloud-centric architectures to meet the needs of new IT. Market data from Dell ’Oro group is clearly suggesting this transformation journey[1].
Enterprise IT Expectations
- Flexibility: The newer cloud-native network security services must enable the IT teams the choice of using their preferred applications or cloud hosting environments or any other supporting services. The network security service must be open-ended and integrate with the rest of the ecosystem easily.
- Agility: As the IT and business needs of an enterprise evolve, the network security service must be adaptable, capable of scaling up or down swiftly, covering new geographic locations promptly, and maintaining a global presence.
- Better Security: As part of the transformation to cloud-native services, enterprises expect to have better security posture of the overall infrastructure compared to the previous point-product deployments.
- User Digital Experience: Users are expecting the best quality of service from all IT systems and applications so that they can be productive at all times from anywhere.
- Better ROI: The new cloud-native network security service must enhance the productivity of the users that will impact the business directly and, help the enterprises in reducing their dependency on legacy products and services.
The Big Picture
Enterprises are evaluating the new cloud-service network security services not just from a feature comparison point of view but also from an overall architecture and future-readiness angle.
- When transforming to a new cloud-native architecture and cloud-native service, if the vendor’s points-of-presence (POPs) are built using racks of hardware servers and inside physical data centers, enterprises will not receive the desired outcomes mentioned above.
- If the new cloud-native network security service still relies on IPSec or GRE tunnels, uses TLS 1.2 ciphers with certificates valid for 1 to 3 years, and requires public IP addresses and ports for its gateways, it does not represent a true transformation of network security.
Gartner and several others have been recommending the Automated Moving Target Defence[2] concept of making the security even tighter and harder to crack. Unless there is transformation at the core architecture level, the true benefits of cloud-native architecture will not be realized.
Cloudbrink has been innovating on several fronts such as using cloud-native POPs called as FAST Edges, using only mutually trusted TLS connections (MTLS) over TLS 1.3 cipher suites, MTLS certificates that are rotated every few hours, SDP-compliance gateways that never need any fixed public IP or port or inbound connections, and intuitive user and admin interfaces.
Interested?
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[1] https://www.delloro.com/news/cloud-native-network-security-up-17-percent-hardware-down-2-percent-as-network-security-market-hits-5-9-b-in-2q-2024
