The first blog I wrote about elastic cloud gateways prior to Black Hat 2019 referenced next-generation firewalls relative to the shift to application-centric, Layer 7 scanning, and the massive impact that had on the network security market. What I didn’t appreciate at the time is how similar the trajectory of the two spaces would be. In the 10 months since Black Hat, we’ve witnessed a massive amount of momentum in this area. In fact, recently completed ESG research on elastic cloud gateways found that 94% of organizations reported usage of, or some level of interest in, these types of solutions. With secure access services edge (SASE) having become common terminology within the network security space, I’m often asked what the difference is between ECG and SASE. The fact is, there are many more similarities than differences; however, the differences that do exist are important.
Insight
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XDR may succeed but XDR vendors face deployment challenges and competition on several fronts.My colleague Dave Gruber and I are all over this new concept called XDR. Just what is this new acronym all about? In a recent CSO Online blog, I defined XDR as:
An integrated suite of security products spanning hybrid IT architectures, designed to interoperate and coordinate on threat prevention, detection, and response. XDR unifies control points, security telemetry, analytics, and operations into one enterprise system.
Hmm, sounds interesting but is there a market for yet another type of security product? (more…)
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COVID-19 introduced the business world to a new and previously unforeseen risk factor, in-person face-to-face interactions. For knowledge workers, the result was a mass exodus out of corporate offices and into their homes, now dependent on remote work. For the IT organizations tasked with supporting their businesses and those knowledge workers, COVID-19 reaffirmed the importance of digital transformation, now as a risk mitigation tool, emphasizing the continued importance of streamlining operations, while accelerating cloud usage to shift more of the risk burden to third-party providers.
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I wrote some months ago that under Sanjay Mirchandani, Commvault was not just changing, it had already changed. Fast forward a few months and we now find ourselves in a totally different world. But one thing that hasn’t changed and stands out is the continued execution and focus of the Commvault team, even through these confusing times. -
This year, Pure Storage’s Accelerate Event went digital and the experience was impressive. While as an industry the transition from in-person to virtual events has deliver mixed results (so much so, I wrote a blog about it), Pure Accelerate 2020 was brief, to the point, and managed to simultaneously inform and entertain. If you don’t believe me, you can still check out much of the content still on Pure’s site.
And in the spirit of digital events, I collaborated with my colleague, Christophe Bertrand, to pull together a brief video on our impressions of the event and the announcements. Prior to COVID-19, my colleagues at ESG and I would often create a “man on the street” video at the event. This year, it’s more of an “analyst from the home office” video. Hope you enjoy.
Some highlights from Pure Accelerate 2020:
Pure Storage CEO Charlie Giancarlo presented Pure’s vision to deliver a modern data experience focusing on three pillars:
- Secure the foundation and focus on flexibility – As businesses and IT organizations face uncertainty, leveraging technologies that offer security and flexibility can empower organizations to more quickly and easily adapt to change.
- Automate everything – Focus on technologies that maximize the value of human capital, a business’ most valuable asset.
- Status quo no more – COVID-19 can serve as a catalyst to create positive change within your organization.
As for the product announcements:
- Pure Storage announced it is offering its Pure-as-a-Service for free for 3 months when you sign up for a 1-year contract.
- Purity 6.0 for FlashArray, which introduces //FA Files which adds file storage, NFS, and SMB support to FlashArray to provide unified storage and increase the benefits to workload consolidation.
- Purity ActiveDR offers continuous replication capability, helping to minimize recovery times and simplify protection with single command failover and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing.
- With the Evergreen Storage subscription model, both //FA Files and ActiveDR are available via an upgrade and require no additional licenses and no added support costs.
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To explore user perspectives around SASE solutions and elastic cloud gateway architectures, Enterprise Strategy Group recently completed a research study on the convergence of network security tools through a consolidated, cloud-delivered platform. The study explored pain points with current approaches and tools, interest in and important elements of an ECG approach, and what organizations expect to gain from implementing an ECG architecture. To explore some of the research, I invited my colleague Jon Oltsik to discuss the findings and what they mean.
In the video, Jon and I discuss:
- ECG interest. Suffice it to say, very few organizations are not interested in an ECG type of network security approach, but we discuss how organizations are thinking about the deployment model and anticipated business outcomes associated with elastic cloud gateways.
- The shift to cloud-delivered network security tools. I share some Enterprise Strategy Group research findings on where the market stands in the transition to cloud, and the reasons organizations are quickly moving to a cloud-delivery model.
- How networking fits into the architecture. We discuss how organizations see networking, and specifically SD-WAN, fitting into security overall, and an ECG approach specifically. I explain that this is a longer transition and will likely vary from company to company.
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My colleague Dave Gruber is such a great guest that I invited him back for an unparalleled SOAPA video part 3. In our final installment, Dave and I talk about:
- XDR deployment models. XDR deployment will be an iterative process, rolling out on a security controls replacement basis. Dave describes how organizations will have to pick a starting point and then integrate additional controls for incremental architectural benefits over time.
- Who needs XDR? Dave and I agree that midmarket and small enterprise organizations with small security teams will gravitate to XDR sooner rather than later. We may see some industry affinity as well, in verticals like state/local government, education, healthcare, and others.
- XDR and the SOC. XDR won’t replace tried-and-true SOC systems like SIEM, SOAR, or threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) anytime soon so interoperability is key. The best XDR platforms will provide high fidelity alerts and forensic details to these traditional SOC technologies.
- The future of SOAPA and XDR. As an architecture, Dave is bullish on SOAPA, believing it will continue to evolve and improve. XDR is a bit more of a wildcard, especially in the large enterprise market, but Dave and I agree that major technology suppliers are investing and resourcing XDR R&D and go-to-market efforts, so it’s likely to gain momentum. If XDR can fulfill its promise of improving security efficacy and operational efficiency, customers will come running.
Thanks for participating, Dave, old buddy, old pal. More SOAPA videos coming soon!
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In this episode of Data Protection Conversations, I catch up with Justin Augat from iLand.
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First came the traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDW). Structured data is integrated into an EDW from external data sources using ETLs (check out my recent blog post on this). The data can then be queried by end-users for BI and reporting. EDWs were purpose built for BI and reporting. But with the growing desire to incorporate more data, of different types, from different sources, of different change rates, the traditional EDW has fallen short. It does not support unstructured data (i.e., video, audio, unstructured text, etc.), streaming is for the most part out of the question, there is no data science or machine learning that can be done directly on the data, and because of their closed/proprietary nature, costs quickly skyrocket as organizations scale their deployments. Modern, cloud-based EDWs have looked to address several of these challenges and done a good job of it, but some challenges still remain, with the obvious being lack of unstructured data support.
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The recent research ESG conducted on the impact of COVID-19 on knowledge workers and on IT spending intentions revealed a few interesting findings that directly affect data protection. Backup and recovery is hot! While some organizations are cutting their IT budgets, not every one is and some specific technologies are actually doing better than others. Among the top 3 technologies least likely to be reduced: cybersecurity, remote/telework solutions…and data protection! 26% of our IT executive respondents said their data protection budget is actually going increase, and 54% will keep it steady. Cloud technologies and services fare very well across the board as one could have guessed in the current climate.
End-users also reported suffering from an intensification of cyber-attacks, making the remediation strategies (backup and recovery) even more relevant.
For end-users, this means that more than ever you should inspect your current backup and recovery infrastructure, its SLAs, and test its capabilities. Many new options for remote management now exist, and with many workloads migrating to the cloud, it may be time to revisit how you are protecting those data assets.
What this means for vendors of backup and recovery solutions, especially cloud-focused offerings, is that it’s a great time to double down on your marketing efforts and investments. People are listening. They want to spend to more, and need to modernize in many cases.
Never a dull moment in this market!
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In part 2 of our SOAPA video, I welcome back my astute colleague, Dave Gruber. The conversation turns to XDR, a market segment that Dave and I collaborate on. I ask Dave about:
- The definition of XDR. It’s a nebulous industry term but Dave nails it by explaining that XDR is a method for bringing controls together to improve security telemetry collection, correlation, contextualization, and analytics. There’s also an operational side of XDR to help coordinate response and remediation across multiple controls simultaneously.
- Whether XDR is a product or an architecture. When Dave and I first put our heads together on XDR, we realized that it looks a heck of a lot like SOAPA. Since XDR is often presented as an integrated suite from a single vendor, it’s kind of a product. Alternatively, some vendors offer open APIs and a partner ecosystem, so it’s kind of an architecture as well. Regardless, it’s still definitely SOAPA!
- Where XDR is today. Dave admits that it’s early on for XDR and current versions start with common data collection and correlation, acting as a data lake for security analysts. Many vendors are adding advanced analytics as well. The goal is to detect “low and slow” attacks that compromise systems, move laterally across networks, escalate privileges, and ultimately exfiltrate data. In theory, XDR can detect these campaigns as it has coordinated eyes on everything.
My SOAPA video with Dave was going so well that I invited him back for Part 3 of our video. Unprecedented! Stay tuned.
XDR may succeed but XDR vendors face deployment challenges and competition on several fronts.
HPE’s Discover 2020 virtual event continued this week, with a day focused on storage. On the whole, HPE’s virtual Discover experience has been impressive, entertaining, and well managed. Check it out, the 
I wrote some months ago
First came the traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDW). Structured data is integrated into an EDW from external data sources using ETLs (
The recent research ESG conducted on the impact of COVID-19 on knowledge workers and on IT spending intentions revealed a few interesting findings that directly affect data protection. Backup and recovery is hot! While some organizations are cutting their IT budgets, not every one is and some specific technologies are actually doing better than others. Among the top 3 technologies least likely to be reduced: cybersecurity, remote/telework solutions…and data protection! 26% of our IT executive respondents said their data protection budget is actually going increase, and 54% will keep it steady. Cloud technologies and services fare very well across the board as one could have guessed in the current climate.