Security in the Virtualized Data Center

[#1]

I’d like to pick up where Doug left off on the subject of Juniper’s recent acquisition of Altor Networks. The topic of how to secure a highly virtualized data center has certainly been front and center for us and our customers for much of the past year. While the future is often difficult to predict, several trends have been relatively clear:

• The scale requirements for protecting the data center perimeter continue to grow as the aggregate bandwidth connecting data centers to the Internet grows – this growth in bandwidth is driven by factors such as consolidation (e.g. from 7 data centers down to 3), increasing bandwidth requirements of applications (richer media apps) and increased VDI deployments (logically placing employee desktops inside the data center).

• As I’ve noted previously, the sophistication of threats is driving up processing power and memory for each unit of bandwidth requiring security services.

• The quantity of “east-west” traffic (machine-to-machine traffic for which neither end of the connection is outside the data center) has increased as application architectures become more componentized (e.g., web services, SOA).

• Notwithstanding the rapid adoption of virtualization, not all workloads in the data center will be virtualized for the foreseeable future.

So, what do these trends portend?

1. Solutions which depend entirely on physical appliances or virtual firewalls will invariably fall short in securing all aspects of the data center of the future.
2. The scale challenges will be dealt with in three distinct ways: (1) by scaling the capacity of individual appliances (Moore’s Law helps here), (2) by banding multiple appliances into a single logical collection and (3) by delivering a significant amount of security services for east-west traffic utilizing general purpose compute power on the hosts which generate the traffic.
3. Orchestrating and managing the collection of physical and virtual security appliances as one logical security “substrate” will be the key to delivering a more secure data center with low TCO.

What excites me about having highly scalable SRX appliances and highly distributed Altor firewalls in the same portfolio is that Juniper can now provide the optimal mix of real and virtual appliances to meet the needs of a broad range of customers. Stitching these assets into a seamless offering is the task we have set for ourselves in 2011.

[#2]

GOOD ONE . bookmarked it !

kamran shakil

ccie sec #28832