By Nishant Arora
San Francisco, Nov 16 (IANS) At a time when governments and enterprises the world over are brainstorming over ways to secure their data on the Cloud platform, a right mix of security in both hardware and software is the key to ward off hackers and minimise cyber attacks, a top security expert has reiterated.
As more and more companies are migrating their data into public, private or hybrid Cloud, the task is mammoth and requires robust end-point security.
"People are asking not just what cloud strategy do you have, they want a secured end-point cloud strategy. I find it fascinating because enterprises are asking more holistic questions about how they want to run their businesses in a secured way," Cisco's Chief Digital Officer Kevin Bandy told IANS.
In the last 15 months, Bandy has met nearly 450 individual companies and everyone wants a secured Cloud experience once there.
"They want to move across the Cloud spectrum, be it public, private or hybrid. I never hear someone talking about one Cloud strategy. What the companies are not structured to do is to truly stretch data and move workload across all three Clouds in a hackers-free environment. This migration needs an enormous amount of security," Bandy added.
The key today is to provide security in both software and hardware. "In the fragmented security market, a global networking giant like Cisco is one company that has to ability to secure your data by providing security both at the software and hardware levels," Bandy noted.
Cloud data traffic is expected to rise 3.7 fold -- up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1 ZB per year by 2020, a new Cisco report has revealed.
The rapid growth of Cloud traffic is attributed to the increased data migration to Cloud architectures owing to their ability to scale quickly and efficiently support more workloads than traditional data centres.
And with this, data security automatically becomes the first priority for enterprises, especially at a time when cyber attacks are on the rise.
A massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack directed at the internet management firm Dyn caused outages for its customers like Twitter, Reddit, Spotify and SoundCloud in October this year.
At least five Russian banks had to tackle a week-long DDoS attacks last week.
DDoS is a type of attack where multiple compromised systems, which are often infected with a Trojan, are used to target a single system causing a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
In such a scenario, to help enterprises accelerate smooth transition to active data and optimise Cloud software adoption, Cisco has introduced UCS S-Series -- a new storage-optimised server with state-of-the-art data-protection solutions.
Cisco has also unveiled the next generation of its "ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite", a hybrid cloud software solution that offers Infrastructure Automation, Service Management, Cloud Management and, most important -- Big Data Automation while reducing risk with near real-time diagnostics and historical analysis.
This is a crucial exercise in helping governments build smart cities with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities.
"I think many companies are looking at IoT as a reflection of what is coming in the near future. But to me, several of those firms already have connected devices but not a comprehensive IoT strategy," Bandy pointed out.
Cisco wants to build something that is highly software- and hardware-driven. The teams are spending enormous amounts of time on two things: orchestration and automation.
"Customers have loved that scenario because they recognise scenarios around security, analytics and automation so that they can make a decision around software-defined networking," Bandy noted.
For smart cities, focus on health care and education is important.
"Once you have connectivity across civil organisations, hospitals, fire rescue, police, transportaion and so on, the challenge then is to help the connected devices orchestrate as one, secured network. In India, the conversation today is which network infrastructure can tie all those individual pieces together and Cisco is here for that," Bandy added.
(Nishant Arora was in San Francisco at the invitaion of Cisco. He can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
