Surveys Conducted at Cisco Live Milan and RSA Conference 2014 Reveal Key Challenges to Securing Software-Defined Data Centers
Tufin Technologies, the market-leading provider of Security Policy Orchestration solutions, today announced international survey results that highlight specific security challenges that need to be addressed in order to enable innovations such as the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Ninety-one percent of the 169 network and security managers surveyed at Cisco Live in Milan in January, and the 82% of the 203 security managers polled at the RSA Conference 2014 in San Francisco reported that the on-demand nature of virtualization and the cloud has increased pressure on them to deliver applications and services faster, with 40% citing complexity as the biggest barrier to network security. Tufin’s Orchestration Suite ensures SDDC’s can live up to their full potential by providing automation that improves network security amid increased complexity, while matching the accelerated pace of change that next-generation data centers require.
“Virtualization and the cloud are dramatically increasing the rate and volume of network changes, forcing security managers to find new and better ways of ensuring security policies are kept intact throughout these rapid changes,” said Reuven Harrison, CTO, Tufin. “We provide them with the ability to marry automation with security, while maintaining full control over change processes. This enables organizations to reap the full benefits of next generation networking technologies without sacrificing security.”
To achieve this move towards a dynamic, services-oriented virtualized architecture, applications, network and security teams must become more closely aligned and communicative. This requirement was magnified by a larger October 2013 Tufin-commissioned survey in which 71% of more than 500 senior IT professionals found themselves having to adopt new processes, learn new technologies and interact with new people because of the imperative to work together as a larger team.
Both networking and security managers pointed to specific issues resulting from the intense pace of change in today’s business environment, highlighting several opportunities to improve network security and overall network operations:
As revealed by these surveys, security and network teams are aligned on the value of automation. 35% of security managers and 39% of network managers believe automation can improve the accuracy of change in a complex network, and 20% of all respondents believe this would establish a consistent and repeatable process across all departments.
The Tufin Orchestration Suite™ provides network and security managers with a complete, automated solution for designing, provisioning, and auditing network security changes. With powerful technologies including network topology awareness, security configuration analysis and process automation, it orchestrates complex processes across applications, servers and network devices, dramatically shortening the time it takes to make network configuration changes. Extending the benefits of IT automation to network security, Tufin’s award-winning products accelerate service delivery, increase IT agility, and reduce the time spent on security changes and audits by up to 80%.
“While the cloud and virtualization are introducing new risks and challenges, they are also introducing huge opportunities to innovate network management,” said Harrison. “Any network infrastructure change impacts availability and security equally - managing them independently no longer makes sense. As software-defined architectures continue to evolve, the implementation of security policy orchestration can literally automate increased collaboration between network and security operations teams, providing the momentum needed to optimize management of next generation networks.”
