Cloud: Go Global, Stay Secure

You can’t stand still in business: you either grow — meeting new technical, industry, and customer demands — or you die. Today’s biggest growth opportunity is the cloud, and while it brings the world to your doorstep, it also brings complexities. Organizations are managing issues around 24×7 connectivity, big data and analytics, and of course, security.

Effective cybersecurity, and the trust it embodies, is now table stakes, but achieving that protection without wasting money and resources requires a new approach built around a comprehensive network that enables your business to perform and grow, while remaining secure.

According to IDC: • More than 85% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to multicloud architectures by 2018. • Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to reach $266 billion in 2021, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21%, and enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will account for over half of that.

When you compare that with overall IT spending, which IDC expects to grow 2% this year and just 4% in 2018, it’s clear that cloud looms large in the enterprise’s future.

The latest Global State of Information Security survey by PwC and CSO finds that although IT is the biggest function to embrace the cloud (63%), other areas are quickly following: operations (36%); customer service (34%); marketing and sales (34%); and finance (32%). The top drivers include improving agility and security.

Both security and the network are critically important to success in the cloud, according to IDC. “Network upgrades continue to be the focus of public cloud deployments, as network bandwidth has become by far the largest bottleneck in cloud datacenters,” says Kuba Stolarski, research director for Computing Platforms at IDC.

Security is such a priority that it is seeing CAGRs in line with cloud spending growth — i.e., 19.8% between 2017 and 2021. There are multiple reasons for this increased focus on security, from the larger attack surface — data centers, networks, and billions of devices — to the most significant reason: that’s where most of the money is.

In a cloud-based world, if you’re not available, accessible, and secure, you’re not in business. A leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, Juniper Networks believes the synergy between security and connectivity is just going to increase, which should make its Software-Defined Secure Network strategy even more attractive.

“SDSN essentially self-drives security for the network,” says Sherry Ryan, Juniper VP and CISO. “It enables SOCs (Security Operations Centers) to centralize and automate security, giving them the ability to move beyond the days when you had a strong perimeter and would focus on prevention. In the modern organization, we don’t have the luxury of having a strong perimeter, so we have to focus on improving our ability to detect outside and inside threats and respond to them quickly. And that’s exactly what the SDSN does.”

Juniper’s SDSN is a unified cybersecurity platform that “leverages the entire network and an open ecosystem, which is the right defense posture for customers to take in order to best keep today’s networks safe,” says Rob Ayoub, research director, IDC Security Products Program.

That’s an important differentiator in an increasingly cloud-first world, says Kevin Hutchins, Juniper’s SVP of strategy and product line management. “Not many people in the market have the ability to provide that combined value proposition of both security and connectivity.”