The Next Big Thing in Network Security

The next big thing for network security is automation and orchestration. It will become the key enabler to truly realize the vision of your next-generation data center. Here’s an excerpt from my latest Security Week article:

“In a private cloud environment, applications and desktops are increasingly being virtualized at an unprecedented rate and scale. As the number of virtual machines (VMs) increases, automation and orchestration is no longer a “nice to have.” It has not only become increasingly complex to configure and manage multiple security devices, but also extremely inefficient and prone to error.

The ability to translate complex business and organization goals into a set of automated data center workflows is critical to not slowing down the application delivery process. It is also an essential part of making compliance and security requirements a lot easier to manage in a very dynamic environment. To fully realize the promise of private clouds, the traditional IT infrastructure -- in particular network security -- needs to transform into agile and adaptive end-to-end automated processes.”

If you’re interested in understanding how Palo Alto Networks interoperates in an SDN network with automation and orchestration systems, check out the following upcoming events with our technology partner Arista Networks. In both these events, we will demonstrate a specific use case of high-performance firewalling deployment using SDN:

• June 27 Webinar – demonstrates implementation of a high-performance, large scale Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewall deployment using Arista DirectFlow (controller-less OpenFlow)
• July 12 SDN Central DemoFriday – Arista Networks, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk demo of a high-performance, large scale  next-generation firewall deployment featuring SDN, OpenStack and VXLAN.