Judging by last week’s Capital One breach and Equifax settlement, cybersecurity remains a topical, if not ugly, subject. The timing couldn’t be better for these unfortunate events. Why? Because the cybersecurity community gets together this week in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON to discuss how to better deal with security vulnerabilities and improve threat prevention, detection, and response.
While security appliances are far from dead, network security goes well beyond perimeter-based packet inspection of ingress/egress traffic. It is evolving into a pervasive service, inspecting and filtering traffic across physical data centers, virtual servers, and cloud-based workloads of all types. Think central management and distributed enforcement. Vendors such as Check Point, Cisco, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Juniper, and Palo Alto Networks get this and are innovating in this direction. That said, how far along are they? Furthermore, are customers buying in, or do they continue to look for “best-of-breed” network security technologies of various form factors? We’ll be asking those questions in Vegas conference rooms all week.
