Reporting from VMworld: Security Remains Top Concern for Private Cloud

In the Vegas bustle of VMworld this week, we conducted a short survey of visitors to our booth to learn more about the technologies they are using in their private clouds and their top related concerns. Participation was high—with 443 respondents from a mix of professionals in IT operations, security operations, network operations, and cloud/server administration.

Highlights from the survey included:

Top cloud concerns: Respondents marked security (78%), application performance (74%), disaster recovery (71%), and customer experience management (51%) as “very important” private cloud concerns. Perhaps not surprising, but confirmation that while the claims of a secure architecture attract users to VMware’s solutions, users still crave reassurance that they are doing the right things to secure themselves.

Assumption of security: 79% of respondents marked security as a “very important” concern, while 78% believe their private cloud is secure. So they are concerned, but also feel that virtualized environments are more secure? Or are they in denial? An interesting anecdote from a booth manager was that, when completing the survey, more than a few participants added, “Well, I hope our cloud is secure.” Of course, the booth manager went on to explain to them how Gigamon can help them to see that their hopes were justified. Maybe we should have also asked how many had previously experienced a network breach, especially considering reports such as FireEye’s “Cybersecurity’s Maginot Line: A Real-world Assessment of the Defense-in-Depth Model,” which revealed that nearly 97% of organizations surveyed had been breached—and this was while research for the study was being conducted!

Percent virtualized: 66% of respondents are more than 50% virtualized and nearly 25% are fully virtualized. To be more accurate, however, several respondents added, “We’re 90-95% virtualized, so can really only mark more than 50%.” Not unexpected at a VMware show, but it emphasizes the reliance on virtual technology among the business community and the pressing need to ensure the ability to see what’s going on in virtual environments as easily as in the physical world.

Technologies used in private clouds: VMware ESX (88%), VMware NSX (23%), OpenStack (9%), Cisco ACI (8%), do not have private cloud (6%), and other (3%). The NSX number was significant—considering VMware’s rapidly growing NSX customer base still only numbers approximately 1700 in total. But, at the same time, not altogether surprising as many booth visitors said they’d heard how Gigamon can help provide the same level of visibility into NSX that they are accustomed to having in their physical network and wanted to visit us to learn more.

In fact, we also had several ecosystem partners and integrators, who develop custom solutions for large customers, come to speak to us about the enormous value they see in the NSX model Gigamon has put together with partners like RSA—whereby Gigamon handles traffic access in NSX so that they can focus on their core expertise in data analysis. Affirmation, once again, that #wefightsmart is the way to go.