A CTO predicts integration of IT and security operations, the emergence of the application infrastructure manager and a move to network orchestration. At Tufin Technologies, Reuven Harrison, Tufin’s CTO and co-founder, believes that the next few years will see major changes in the way networks and security are operated and managed. Key changes predicted are:
1) More integrated IT security and operations – IT security and general IT operations have traditionally been managed separately but will now become more integrated and less siloed. An intense threat landscape is emerging alongside the increasing need for business agility that requires constant change. This means faster, more agile and more automated business processes. Orchestration of IT and security processes is key to business success and will enable organisations to deploy applications faster, more accurately and with increased security.
2) The emergence of the application infrastructure manager – The role of network and security operations has been evolving over the past few years. Many administrators are already experiencing the change through new sets of people and business collaborations such as virtualisation, servers and applications. As almost every aspect of the business uses enterprise applications like ERP, supply chain management or financial transactions, this trend will accelerate in 2014 so much that a new role will come into existence – an application-infrastructure manager. This job will require networking, security, virtualisation and application expertise to bridge the infrastructure needs of the company with the needs of the DevOps teams working on these applications.
3) Management of network infrastructure will become orchestrated – Orchestrated infrastructure management will become the next big thing for automated change management. With the increasing complexity and frequency of changes brought on by virtualization and the Cloud, orchestration is quickly gaining momentum in network security circles within the enterprise. Orchestration solutions can automatically provision changes to relevant devices and systems that rely on having current and accurate security policy data while automating tedious and painful manual network configuration change processes, all while being able to control the process which is crucial to maintain network security.
Reuven Harrison, CTO, Tufin says: “We’re seeing the proliferation of virtualisation and the cloud, along with emerging technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and software defined data centers and new business models that rely, more than ever on applications. This combined with recent announcements by vendors including VMWare, Palo Alto, Cisco and F5, will set the stage for several disruptive shifts in network security operations over the next year or so.
“Enterprises have quickly accelerated their operations, enabling them to deploy applications faster. So with the orchestration train having left the station and organizations becoming increasingly application-focused, businesses must now embrace major change in the way their networks are managed to enable much faster business agility or risk losing competitive edge.” Visit www.tufin.com
