Five success factors for infrastructure transformation

The need to route more traffic over internet connections changes security considerations. It increases potential points of entry for attackers. In a global survey, ‘market leading security’ was cited as the most important feature in both NFV and hybrid WAN deployments (by 71% and 66% of respondents respectively) and was considered the second most important feature for SD-WAN (with 52% placing it top).

“The growth of SD-WAN is a broad-based trend that is driven largely by the enterprise desire to optimize cloud connectivity for remote sites. As customers continue to integrate their infrastructure components with software, they can do things like implement consistent management and security policies based on user, device or application requirements,” says Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

Access control policies become increasingly important. Lars Jerkland says, “Often when companies start to scale, they adopt cloud technology. Early adopters are often small departments. And because they are looking for agility and speed they don’t often build in the governance models right from the beginning.”

Part of the appeal of outsourcing infrastructure to the cloud is the accompanying outsourcing of network security. But a multi-layered approach to security is needed. As network infrastructure grows more complex, working with providers who can’t manage both the overlay and underlay brings greater exposure to security issues. Businesses need to take ownership of security. They must ensure that partners work with them to deliver security in the era of perimeter-less infrastructure.