Reaping The Security Rewards Of SDN

When Interop gears up tomorrow in New York, you can bet your trade-show tchotchkes that software defined networking (SDN) will dominate airtime as one of the prevalent themes. Many vendors and pundits will push the performance and operational boosts from SDN as the most obvious benefits of SDN strategies. But as organizations roll up their sleeves and dig into the technology and architecture of SDN, they could find that the biggest opportunity for improving IT through it may actually be in security.

SDN could act as a natural technological extension of the accelerating trend toward segmentation, says Reuven Harrison, CTO of Tufin Technologies.

"Security used to be perimeter-based, and now it is becoming based on multiple zone layers within an enterprise network -- the trend is to have more and more smaller zones for improved control," he says, saying that this has increased security complexity as it has brought with it increasingly more network security devices to control those zones.

"Using software-defined networks, rather than going into a specific device and writing command lines when you want to change anything on the network, you can write software that pulls APIs on devices to allow traffic, deny traffic, look at traffic, and report traffic. You can orchestrate security across your network," he says.

Read the rest of this article at Dark Reading.