In my role, I spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about technology trends, with a sharp focus on how security is reaching limits and breaking. This is what drives me as we build products to address market requirements. The whole reason Illumio exists is because I saw that firewalls are reaching limits and needed to be rethought in the age of the cloud. 

As is tradition this time of year, I took some time to think about what has changed in 2017 and what that means for the year ahead. Some of the predictions are grounded in the reality of what's transpired and what we have learned, while others are more speculative and educated guesses based on the data we have.

Introducing a blog series by Illumio CTO, PJ Kirner, that will cover key concepts to help you think about data center and cloud security in a new way, and realign your approach with evolving requirements across application environments. Read the first post of this series, "Why We Need a Data Center and Cloud Security Revolution."

I can’t imagine getting to work without a GPS. Yes, I pretty much drive the same route every day and could probably do it blindfolded, but the GPS helps me get there the fastest by recommending the right route because it has up-to-date real-time data about traffic and can guide me around accidents and traffic jams. It knows both ends of my route, where I’m coming from and where I’m headed to and, mixing in historical data, it can predict the best time for me to leave and always be on time. 

Introducing a blog series by Illumio CTO, PJ Kirner, that will cover key concepts to help you think about data center and cloud security in a new way, and realign your approach with evolving requirements across application environments.

Revolutions happen for good reason. They’re the result of a divergence of expectations and reality causing pent-up frustration that pushes the need for change. Old ways no longer align with new requirements and pressure reaches a boiling point where there is no other option but to make that change. 

Evolutions in applications, the data center, and cloud have pushed security to the limits, where old ways like choke points and network based approaches no longer align with new requirements of application teams. These teams have gotten used to new models of resource utilization and application delivery — and there's no turning back. It’s time for a revolution in security.

I believe that innovation comes from people who have an unstoppable drive to improve the world and are placed in an environment with constrained resources. This is why top sports players have their best games when playing against the most challenging opponents. And “threading the needle” wouldn't mean much if the eye of the needle wasn’t so tiny. It is exactly these challenging and constrained environments that innovators who have it in their veins look for, and are the cauldron from where innovations are conceived.

The Illumio journey started in such an environment (as many successful startups do).

For us, it began in a world where choke-point firewalls were not able to keep up and deliver security segmentation that was sufficiently dynamic to keep up with today’s modern data center and distributed application needs. Dev ops, microservice architectures, public cloud, and containers are all parts that fueled the evolution of the dynamic and distributed data center, but were causing strain and tension on those traditional security segmentation solutions.

If you’re running Enterprise Security Operations for a data center, how could you not adopt a siege mentality? You have attackers coming from every direction, getting more and more sophisticated. Your business partners are asking for an ever-growing footprint, which, from your perspective, equates to an ever-growing attack surface.