Yesterday, I reported on Cisco's new ACI security announcements and an overview of our secure data center strategy. Today, I wanted to share some interesting market insights that we pulled from a survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) that Cisco commissioned, and that validates some key data center security trends and requirements that support our product strategy. Some of the key conclusions and data collected were shared in press coverage of the product announcement. The full survey results are here, and below are some summary graphics we prepared for our launch event.
Project Overview
Cisco commissioned the survey (conducted by ESG) to learn more about the challenges and issues IT professionals face when planning and implementing data center security.
Demographics
Top Survey Findings
The people problem: Implementing network security controls is tedious and time-consuming.
Solution: Just like SDN revolutionized the data center by automating network configuration changes, ACI is accelerating security changes by automating device updates and configuring how security services are inserted into application networks, helping to ensure greater accuracy and allowing IT to keep up with business requirements.
Network security operational issues leads to human error and configuration problems.
Solution: Manual tasks eventually lead to human errors which result in security breaches and service outages. Automating many of these tasks can ensure accuracy and reduce risk.
It's difficult to make changes to security controls once they are implemented.
Solution: A prime example of what ACI can automate and accelerate from a security perspective is the removal of outdated ACL or firewall rules. Most organizations report this is a really tedious and time consuming task, and at least 20% of organizations reported that's it not even worth the effort. But this can lead to vulnerabilities, inconsistency and compliance challenges.
IT security pros say that more granular network segmentation could help, but few are implementing this yet.
Solution: Cisco ACI's implementation of more granular security policies between individual tenants, applications and workloads can definitely help confine attacks that otherwise could spread laterally between hosts. Too few organizations implement this today, and most agree that such segmentation would have helped against earlier attacks.
IT security professionals would like to move toward more automation and orchestration.
Solution: More security is great, but automating security operations and accelerating network security changes with greater accuracy is also key to halting attacks. ACI can greatly help with the automation that organizations need. We didn't create a snappy Instagraphic that summarizes this market data, but I'll pull the following quote from Forrester that I used yesterday on automation of security tasks being a key initiative for most organizations to improve their threat response.
Over the previous 10 years, "attackers are getting better/faster at what they do at a higher rate than defenders are improving their trade." If CISOs want to ever improve their abilities to detect and respond to adversaries, they must move from reactive to proactive operations through automation. Every bit of operational friction that S&R pros can reduce using automation will result in a more-agile security posture that makes detecting and responding to adversaries more productive. CISOs can expect automation to become one of the next great security buzzwords. -Forrester Research, "12 Recommendations for your Security Program in 2015"
Drop us a note in the comments section of your opinion of these ESG findings and market data. Is this what you are seeing in your experience? If you didn't get a chance to see us this week at Interop, including our new security demos with Cisco FirePOWER, I hope you are coming to Cisco Live San Diego in June and can hopefully check us out there.