Key Message from Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2017: We Need to Work Better Together

Last week, I had a security choice to make: Go to the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, MD, or Palo Alto Network’s Ignite 2017 in Vancouver, BC. Of course, Gigamon had a presence at both and I was lucky enough to head north. I wasn’t alone—around 3,500 security professionals were signed up for the conference, including many Gigamon’s technical alliance and channel partners. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising given the natural affinity of our technologies.

For me, one of the major show themes was that the industry needs to work better together to ensure our customers get the protection they are looking for from our technologies. While Palo Alto Networks execs set out an ambitious vision for the future of the security market, they were quick to point out that no one company could deliver everything. Thus, we have to find a way to let customers quickly try out new security technologies without the need for huge, disruptive deployment projects. Albeit with a slightly different focus than Palo Alto Network’s newly laid out vision, this is a message Gigamon has been promoting for some time with our GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform.

Automation and Audience Validation

During our presentation on how Gigamon automated our AWS development environment (including securing each developer’s VPC via an automated VPN extension of our corporate network), the audience further validated the need to work better together. They showed considerable interest in how we automated the set-up of the various tools to remove the need for developers to be expert in each environment they are asked to use, give greater control to IT to ensure corporate assets are protected, and reduce the time to developer productivity on a new platform.

Our talk about automation was far from the only mention at the conference. Our partner Splunk was actively promoting their Adaptive Response framework and solutions from the likes of Phantom Cyber were also present. It’s essential that, as an industry, we develop solutions that automate the run-of-the-mill activities that a security analyst currently does by hand. The scarcity of good security talent means we need to ensure our customers get the most possible from every resource they have available. Gigamon is working heavily in this area in conjunction with a number of customers, so look out for announcements later this summer.

The other manifestation of “better together” was through my conversations with our channel partners from all over the World. It was great to spend some time with folks from our new EMEA distributor Exclusive Networks and I also got to talk with channel partners from Canada, Poland, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and, of course, the U.S.A. All of them were full of stories about the value of deploying Gigamon along with Palo Alto Networks devices and eager to discuss how we can add to Palo Alto Network’s new strategy. We had a lot of ideas as you can imagine, but we’ll save those for another blog.