* The security aspect of the 'perfect storm'
Over the past few weeks, we’ve written extensively about the coming “perfect storm” of the confluence of multiple factors within the network. Today’s topic deals with yet another aspect of that storm – security.
All of the aspects of the “perfect storm” – virtualization, SOA/SOB,Web 2.0, application acceleration, etc. – place additional demands on security strategies. This was highlighted in two recently released papers.
The first of the two papers, “Protecting the Enterprise Network through Web Security” comes from AT&T. And even though it may appear to be a bit self-serving, the paper does a great job of making the case for using network-based security products. The reasons for making this shift, as you might imagine, include screening for viruses and spyware, as well as controlling applications like instant messaging. As we move to Web-based SOAs, performing more of this screening before the traffic ever gets to the Enterprise provides a great advantage.
The second paper, “Securing the Unified Communications-Enabled Enterprise”, comes from Cisco. In this paper, Cisco looks in depth at some of the additional security risks as one of the major areas of virtualization. Among the risk areas that need to be addressed for unified communications are privacy of the conversations, confidential messaging, authentication of both users and devices, and preventing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. While there are excellent methods for mitigating these risks, having the methodology is worthless unless it is applied.
Over the coming months and years, virtualization is a trend that will continue to grow. But concurrent with that virtualization, secure virtualization will become an increasingly paramount concern.
