An Inside View: Gigamon Leaders Share Their Thoughts on Trends Impacting Network Visibility and Information Security

As we settle in to 2019 following the holidays and our annual worldwide sales kick off, 2018 deserves one last look along with a sneak-peek into the most impactful network visibility and information security trends we see on the horizon. The prior year for networking and cybersecurity was definitely filled with peaks and valleys. While we moved forward with regulations aimed at improving data security and saw the arrival of the 400Gb technology, organizations continued to realize the complexity and cost of deploying new security solutions, such as migration to the cloud, and retaining essential staff to maintain and monitor them.

Meanwhile, data protection has been compromised as the breadth and depth of data breaches, from both nation-states and threat actors, continued to permeate the news cycles so much so that as a society we are now softened to the impact of the next breach.

If 2018 taught us anything about  information security trends, it’s that security needs to be so much more than defense; there’s a need for improved detection methods, faster threat response and more intelligent and pervasive visibility into network traffic. These requirements will continue throughout the year with increasing intensity, but I believe and expect that it will spark a larger conversation — one that drives demand for the latest security products while reducing the complexity and increasing efficiency of instrumentation that is already in place.

This dialogue is critical because it is clear that industries’, businesses’ and companies’ needs are changing, and as a result all stakeholders and lines-of-business will have to adapt to the new landscape. This includes network and security operations teams working in unison to simultaneously enable and secure vital data-in-motion across enterprises, service providers and federal agencies around the globe.

Recently a few of our team members weighed in on trends they’re anticipating in 2019 and beyond around network visibility and information security topics:

Shane Buckley, President and COO at Gigamon

As cybercriminals continue carrying out sophisticated, large-scale attacks, there’s a simultaneous explosion of data moving across the network. In 2019, organizations need to evolve to be able to accommodate this data explosion — or risk falling behind. As the saying goes, “Slow is the new down,” so it’s time for businesses to accelerate the need for speed when optimizing their network.

In 2019, organizations will begin prioritizing the optimization of their entire network for performance and security due to increased traffic and a growing demand for bandwidth. As a result, we’ll see increased 5G network build out, which will drive significant investments in LAN/WAN infrastructure.

Jack Hamm, Director of Security and Network Operations at Gigamon

I believe the trend of visibility as a key driver of security will continue. The theoretical basis has been well articulated by Winn Schwartau’s concepts around analog network security, which are beginning to be tested in practice and will rapidly become central to secure design. The basic premise is that the protection of an information asset is a function of the speed to detect a threat and the speed to remediate the threat (along with theory around trust matrices that interleaves with that).

We can then see that the amount of time a device is exposed to a threat becomes critically bound to detection and response. So why is that useful? It highlights what I believe will become a series of major trends over the next few years: visibility into all aspects of the environment (network and endpoint) in order to meet the d(t) portion of the equation. Automation of remediation actions in a rapid and accurate manner (network and endpoint) to meet the r(t) portion of the equation.

William Peteroy, CEO and Co-Founder of ICEBRG

2018 was a surprising year that nurtured a vast amount of general tech trends, but the one that stood out to me most was an increase in remote work — specifically for mid-level and senior information security roles. This flexibility allowed talent to continue to spread out and diffuse across the country. Another surprise was that the shared responsibility model for cloud security has still not widely been understood.

As we continue into 2019, I think an important evolution will occur in the enterprise, one that shifts away from traditional networks and hardware infrastructure. Overall, I think that enterprises will be enabled to move faster with more flexibility while managing everything in software.

Jason Rebholz, Senior Director at Gigamon

The public’s broader awareness of cybersecurity has changed. This has been led by an increased number of public notifications of security breaches, some of them with massive amounts of data loss, well into the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of potentially impacted individuals. While these types of attacks have been going on for years, it’s garnering more mass media attention, resulting in wider-spread coverage of the security challenges organizations have been facing for years.

To the untrained eye, it would appear as though every organization is failing at security, and in some cases they are correct. The untold story highlights organizations struggling to investigate and get details out to the public, which often causes more pandemonium and undue stress as misinformation begins to circulate.

The benefits of the increased public awareness bring increased public scrutiny over how organizations are protecting personal data and additional regulations mandating public notification of security breaches. This, in turn, drives more investment into security budgets which should, in theory, provide a safer online experience for the public.

Is your business ready for this ever-changing landscape? For details on how we can help reduce risk, complexity and cost to meet your business needs, visit our website, follow our blog and connect with us on your favorite social channels: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.