What's on the security horizon for 2011?

By Kevin Luk, Country Manager Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, SonicWALL | Feb 1, 2011

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With explosive growth of the market for mobile devices and applications moving to the cloud, the landscape for both bandwidth and security has changed dramatically. Based on feedback from our channel partners and based on our own analysis of global network security issues, SonicWALL looks back at 2010 and predicts industry trends for 2011.

The Need for Bandwidth Control Grows

SonicWALL predicts that managing bandwidth, Internet access, and application control will become critical for organizations in 2011. The proliferation of social media and corporate applications delivered via the cloud brings application chaos and numerous threats to employee productivity and data security.

“We want to know what is going on with the network at all times,” says Matt Simeone, senior network engineer at NetVAD, Inc. “We see employees accessing the corporate network for Facebook or social media apps during business hours. For example, during March Madness (a highly televised and followed sporting event held every March) in the US, access can easily shut down the corporate network. Enacting the right policies and application control is important to manage bandwidth, especially in these scenarios.”

Application intelligence, control and visualization will become a higher priority for companies and corporate bandwidth management policies must be able to make sophisticated distinctions between mission-critical cloud-based applications, streaming and latency-sensitive applications, and business- and personal-use social media and peer-to-peer applications. 

MSPs Embrace the Cloud

“While mass adoption is still around the corner, cloud computing is becoming a sophisticated model,” said Nate Austin, co-founder and vice president of strategic development at Mytech Partners. “Though the growth rate is impressive, peers in the industry agree that movement to the cloud is moving one application at a time.”

Last year, SonicWALL saw customers create a hybrid approach to the cloud by moving select applications to the cloud, while continuing to rely on premises infrastructure for highly confidential or latency sensitive applications. In 2011, leveraging the cloud needs to be a top priority to solution providers. 

Virtualization Changes Security

As more companies virtualized their IT infrastructures driven by cost, SonicWALL anticipates there will be a demand for improved security of virtualized data in 2011. Prioritizing application traffic over a performance-optimized architecture that allows granular policy over bandwidth location based on application type will be essential.

“Where you would previously see six servers, you might now see two,” said Deepak Thadani, president at SysIntegrators. “Security—and security virtualization—is playing a huge role. We will need to offer sophisticated solutions to protect virtualized environments, protecting traffic between virtual machines.”
 

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