Check Point: Securing the data centre

With data centers moving quickly down the path of virtualisation, security needs to keep pace, says Hamish Soper, Check Point Software Technologies New Zealand country manager.

One of the greatest dilemmas New Zealand organisations face is how to secure their increasingly virtual environments without compromising the performance of their network.

As cyber attacks continue to increase and evolve in sophistication, ensuring data center security has become a top priority for customers not only in New Zealand, but all over the world. However data center security should not be compromised by tradeoffs in performance.

There are many opportunities and security technologies available for the channel to work with customers to provide advanced security protections without compromises in network performance.

These security packages allow the channel to implement modern hardware architecture that leverages a wide spectrum of software optimisations and accelerations that in turn maximise hardware utilisation. They offer protection consolidation, delivering better performance to protect customers against advanced persistent threats and other modern cyber attacks.

Toward virtualisation

As today’s data center moves quickly down the path of virtualisation, it is important for security to keep pace with virtual environments. Virtualisation has greatly increased the speed at which applications can be deployed and delivers the added benefits of agility and mobility to meet changing business requirements.

Network security for virtualised environments must match this speed and agility through automated security management and provisioning, while enabling seamless support for existing security operational processes and policy.

This move to virtualisation offers the channel an additional opportunity to work with customers. Machines can move from one host to another, but the physical and legacy security is not enough, so channel partners have an important role to play to ensure organisations are protected and their virtual environments are secure.

Alleviating the physical and administrative burden

Enterprise networks undergo frequent changes. This is especially true for virtualised data centers and service oriented architectures (SOA) where applications move from host to host, virtual hosts move from one physical server to another, and networks are reconfigured dynamically.

Mobile users and cloud services extend the reach of the enterprise network. These frequent and fast- paced changes place an immense burden on security administrators who have traditionally been required to manage network access controls as a function of network addresses and services.

As this increased administrative and physical data center burden becomes a headache for New Zealand organisations, managed service providers are well placed to reduce that burden for customers by offering a secure data center and network as a managed service.

With the increased sophistication of security threats and the growing burden of managing an optimised and secure data center, the New Zealand channel can not only offer its customers high-end network security to the most demanding data center environments, but provide an ongoing data center and network infrastructure that securely supports customer requirements at all stages of their deployments and operation.