LATEST INTELLIGENCE

For all of the change that has happened over the past few years , there is one thing that has remained stubbornly constant : the basic hub-and-spoke network architecture that most companies utilise .

This architecture used to make sense . Long ago , before the Internet was a bustling place of business and core infrastructure , companies placed their workloads in data centres . These data centres housed the critical infrastructure and applications . As branch offices , retail storefronts , and satellite locations came online , they too needed access to the centralised applications . Companies built out their networks to mirror that need , with all networking backhauling to their core data centres . After all , the data centre was the central location where all the action occurred .

As time progressed , the Internet began to emerge as a commercially viable disruptor . Naturally , businesses and carriers that had been in the practice of building complex private global networks serviced these private requests by doing what they knew best . They deployed these corporate and consumer services in the same data centres their internal applications were hosted in , and purchased Internet links to provide a route to them .

This fortuitously served a double purpose : Outside consumers could get in , but internal employees spread out across myriad branch offices could now get out . For the time being , hub-and-spoke was still the reigning champion of network architectures .

Over time , threat actors began to capitalise on this architecture , causing a whole new industry to be born : the data centre security stack . Since the hub-andspoke architecture funnels Internet traffic at data centres , large powerful boxes began to be developed to protect those high-capacity lines . Firewalls , intrusion detection , and prevention ruled inbound traffic while secure web gateways ( SWGs ) enforced acceptable use in the outbound direction .

The proliferation of these security systems being deployed at centralised choke points further cemented hub-and-spoke as the dominant network architecture . For a time , the castle-and-moat approach to security seemed viable , and the notion of a network perimeter where everyone outside is bad and everyone inside is good remained dominant .

But the cloud changed all of this . Security measures must now meet users and applications where they are , outside of the perimeter . p

PRESENTED BY

Download

whitepapers free from www . intelligentcio . com / me / whitepapers /

www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST 21