Gigamon brings big data analytics to security

The IT security environment has changed significantly over the past decade. Ten years ago, network security was certainly challenging but straightforward. Most organizations had a single network ingress/egress entry point and protected it with a high performance firewall.

Today, the environment is completely different. Technologies like Internet of Things, cloud computing, software defined networking, BYOD and mobility have made IT much more complicated than ever before. The increase in IT complexity means more attack surfaces and more entry points that need to be protected. IT is now facing an asymmetric challenge where the security team must protect dozens or even hundreds of entry points where hackers merely have to find one way in. Putting a firewall at every possible entry point, which includes branch offices, wireless access points, consumer devices and IoT endpoints would be prohibitively expensive and complicated to manage.

Adding to the security challenge is the fact that network speeds keep increasing, particularly in the data center where 100Gigabit Ethernet network devices have recently become available. Faster speeds mean more packets being pushed through the network but the time between packets is also reduced so security tools need to process more packets, faster to be effective.

The rise in complexity combined with the exponential growth in network speeds has rendered traditional security methods about as effective as TSA. It’s my belief that security leaders need to fundamentally change the way they approach security and this means more than just investing in more vendors. The 2015 ZK Research Security Survey (I am an employee of ZK Research) revealed that large enterprises now have an average of 32 security vendors, which makes a complicated situation even worse.

To combat this problem, last year Gigamon (Gigamon is a ZK Research client) announced its GigaSECURE security delivery platform (SDP).;