Preparing for Today’s Changing Tech Needs at Re:Invent 2016

Transparency is key; more emphasis will be placed on network visibility: As organizations continue to migrate into a cloud-based environment, they must prepare for the security and control risks associated with the cloud. According to an Ixia research report, 67 percent of respondents deploy business-critical applications on the public cloud—which is often opaque. Day-to-day operations are depending on an environment with a huge visibility gap. It is expected that by 2018, 60 percent of enterprises that implement appropriate cloud visibility and control tools will experience 30 percent fewer security failures. In short, elastic and more comprehensive visibility will mean better security for the enterprise.

 Monitoring for DDoS: In recent weeks, the entire Internet infrastructure has been placed at risk. From Russia to Taiwan, we’re feeling the effects of what massive distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks can do. This type of attack was used in one of the largest cyberattacks in history that shut down 1,600 U.S. websites. We believe this trend will only continue to grow, as hackers find clever new ways to exploit IoT device vulnerabilities to launch attacks. The ability to integrate proper visibility tools looking for DDoS will be a big topic in 2017.

 Security Extending into the Cloud: A part of the push for more transparency and visibility into the cloud will translate directly into better security. It will also allow for centralized security processes to be executed and implemented across cloud boundaries. We are going to see better integrations that will expand a Security Fabric into the cloud. The results will be security that can better and automatically scale as your workloads grow and you dive further into the cloud. Cloud and security vendors will work closer than ever before.

Not All Cloud Taps are Alike: Tapping into cloud data requires using software agents often called cloud taps, virtual taps or vTaps.  They are used to monitor traffic flows, validate security, and verify container boundaries.  If implemented poorly, they will degrade application performance running in the cloud.  While cloud taps for public clouds are still in their early stages, quality of these taps will become a topic in 2017.

Testing at Cloud-Scale:   How much testing is enough?  Every enterprise faces that question and it is even more difficult when their applications are in the cloud.  When it comes to cloud implementations, simulating the environment can be done on a staging site.  Simulating large traffic loads, across a range of application and attacks, encryption of different types and depth, etc. at cloud scale is much more complex.  As the industry leader in multi-terabit cloud-scale traffic testing and the vulnerabilities it uncovers, we are pretty sure that testing at cloud-scale will become a bigger topic in 2017.