Traditional IT systems and security solutions have been centralized, with data and document storage housed on servers which can quickly become single points of failure. With the rising adoption of Everything-as-a-Service, enterprises are becoming more comfortable storing data in public clouds and often distributed across multiple public clouds, accessing and interacting with services over the Internet which is the most decentralized and resilient network in the world. Without security overlays, cloud data is at risk, especially when that data is in motion over the Internet.
With a growing array of multi-cloud applications, from sales and CRM systems, to HR, business intelligence, files storage, email, real time collaboration and video, sensitive data is moving at unprecedented volumes, creating attractive targets for increasingly sophisticated adversaries whether they are attacking data at rest, or data in motion.
This increasing decentralization of IT into the cloud will continue to pose major challenges for security. As the adopters of enterprise blockchain solutions, which are based on decentralization and validation of transactions on a distributed ledger, CEOs, CIOs and CISOs will seek clarity around the ownership and responsibility for securing their mission-critical systems and data. It’s important to make the right choices now when it comes to blockchain, network security and performance architectures.
The good news is, innovation in business applications has never been more exciting! Developers within enterprises, vendors and service providers delivering products and services to enterprises, are leveraging an entirely new world of low-code and no-code tools to build the digital applications and experiences that are defining what it means to remain relevant, agile and competitive.
Business models are being disrupted every day, and business unit owners within enterprises are being empowered to build digital solutions that make companies more attractive to the market, and more efficient to operate. IT and OT roles have changed dramatically, evolving to “DevOps” supporting developers, including those building blockchain-based systems.
While blockchain has largely been sold to improve security, when blockchain-based applications are connected over networks that are not secure, risk can sneak up on enterprises or appear with no warning.
The best way to protect decentralized systems – including those powered by blockchain and distributed ledger software – is to ensure that the endpoints they touch are properly authenticated, that every session is protected while in motion, that edge and cloud compute is observable, manageable and secure.
Blockchain experts and investors are challenging legacy “central trust infrastructure” and moving toward an overarching design principle that is based on decentralization and transparency. As a trusted and decentralized database, the combination of blockchain technology, software and platforms with secure connectivity inevitably leads to the evolution of our decades-old end-to-end principle to the trust-to-trust principle.
With advances in how data is exchanged, protected and how information is shared, supply chains are vastly improved, and IoT systems rise in value. Real time automation can only manifest its value when trust and consensus are assured in environments that cannot be hacked. When large networks, in peer-to-peer configurations, guarantee the integrity of transactions among peers without the involvement of a centrally trusted mediating third party, economics improve dramatically.
When applications, especially mission critical applications that may be running power grids, traffic management systems, water supplies, and more, are made better with blockchain (creating transparency and trust in interactions among the stakeholders without involving a third party) – it is all the more important to fuse secure blockchain platforms with secure, private networking, done best over the Internet, but only when connectivity and sessions can be physically and logically secured.
Leaders in the transport, energy, insurance, finance, and logistics industries, and government agencies are investing in blockchain technology – to automate and validate at scale.
Blockchain, with its promise of immutability, transparency, and peer-to-peer consensus, can provide for trusted audits of networked systems and deliver all the related benefits. When blockchain systems are connected via extremely secure, fast private networks that leverage the public Internet, but control it using advanced overlay solutions – the fusion of blockchain and secure networking starts to multiply the benefits.
Why roll out next-generation blockchain solutions on legacy IP and VPN network architectures, when you can double down on security by delivering those solutions faster and more reliably with software-defined networking capabilities designed to scale and complement the massive potential of disruptive, distributed ledger innovations?
It’s time to evolve to a modern network and security architecture that was built for the cloud and distributed, mobile enterprise environments.
