Applications have continued to move from monolithic stacks to more distributed models. Future applications will be even more distributed by breaking up specific application services further into sets of containers and micro-service arrays.  This continued distribution will have dramatic positive impacts on scale, performance and availability.  However, with this increased level of distribution new challenges emerge. Chief among these challenges is the ability to effectively apply security controls for these applications. The modern datacenter is now largely virtualized and is composed of many application “networks”. Trying to apply distributed security controls for this increasingly distributed model of application constructs is proving to be challenging at best and ineffective at worst.
 
The primary emerging threat in today’s modern datacenter is the cyber posture of the resident workloads contained within. The standard approach to securing data centers has emphasized strong perimeter protection to keep threats on the outside of the network. However, this model is ineffective for handling new types of threats – including advanced persistent threats, insider threats, and coordinated attacks. What’s needed is a better model for data center security: one that assumes threats can be anywhere and probably are everywhere, then acts accordingly.
 
During this session, we will look at benefits of this evolving segmented architecture. We will also explore the “art of the possible” around these three areas: