Zero Trust Network needs a Technology Partner. Welcome SD-WAN
Adi Mukadam, CISSP
Transformation expert | Thought leader | Storyteller | Trusted advisor to F500 CIO CISO | Revenue growth | Consultative solution sales | Product Marketing | Network & Security Modernization | SOC Auto-pilot, PTaaS, CTEM
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Zero Trust (Never Trust, Always Verify) is driving strategic roadmaps. Industry experts believe that Zero Trust is the biggest disruption in Cybersecurity since the invention of firewall. The problems solved by Zero Trust Network and its integration with current architecture is imminent. However, is this level of interest and excitement enough for large scale adoption?
Seeking budget for Zero Trust Network is challenging as Enterprise's current IT efforts and spending is focused on Digital Transformation initiatives. As per Gartner, Security spending is set to grow by 8.7% in 2019. Majority of this spending will be around GDPR, Risk Management and Privacy concerns with Digital Transformation, securing Public Cloud, SaaS and IoT deployments.
Cyber risks and business threats continues to rise along with the budget challenges. Security leaders wanting to adopt Zero Trust Network must innovate and evolve their current architecture over a period of time. They should look to maximize current investments and identify technology partners to enable Zero Trust Network building blocks.
An obvious partner is Software Defined - Wide Area Network (SD-WAN). SD-WAN is transforming branch networking, enhanced routing intelligence along with improved user experience for a range of on premise, public and private cloud enabled applications. SD-WAN has some key foundational building blocks needed for Zero Trust Network, such as visibility and analytics, automation and orchestration of control and data plane, network segmentation. SD-WAN's built-in features and Zero Trust Network framework lays a strong foundation to Software Defined Perimeter (SDP).
By 2020, more than half of WAN edge refresh will be based on SD-WAN. It won't surprise me if SD-WAN vendors will add security features, allow third party integration and expand their offering into SDP and Zero Trust Network. Zero Trust Network journey can piggy back on SD-WAN adoption. Infrastructure, WAN and Security leaders finally have a disruptive opportunity to team up in Enterprise's journey of architecting a secured ecosystem, where security is no longer an afterthought or an add-on.
Exciting times ahead of us !
Cloud Security Architect at Microsoft
6 年Interesting take on ZT security with SD-WAN as a friend. The WAN handles important data that cannot just be left to be secured with encryption, would love to see SD-WAN vendors integrate more ZT policies.?
Bridging Tech and Creativity | Storytelling Sorcerer | Making Work a Joy Ride
6 年Well written. If one follows the news and it’s obvious that today’s security approaches are inadequate to protect sensitive data. “Zero trust” which centers on the belief that both internal and external networks cannot be trusted, is the way to secure the network go forward. Historically inside the firewall enterprises don’t really know where all the data was stored, who uses it or sensitivity of that data hence once inside the “flat network”, attackers could move undetected extract the data. With “Digital transformation”, which are data-centric initiatives giving access to more data thus reducing Opex, those internal data sources are being identified and rationalized but these initiative needs to be further extended to understand the data flows between different users, resources and network, then it even more important to enforce access controls and inspection policies on the edge to protect that data.?