Data centers have evolved significantly to keep pace with growing
business demands. Operators in these centers are under immense pressure
to roll out new applications and services faster than ever before. As a
result, organizations are consolidating data centers and adopting
technologies like virtualization, software-defined networking, and cloud
computing. Virtualization enables organizations to utilize their data
center hardware infrastructure effectively, leading to reduction in
costs, and improvements in operational efficiencies. As traditional data
centers evolve to virtualized and cloud computing environments, they
pose significant new security challenges that need to be addressed.
The majority of organizations are still using the same tools for their
virtualized environments—such as antivirus and firewalls—as they did for
their in-house physical machine set-ups. However, existing security
solutions in the data center fail to address the dynamic nature of the
virtualized environment, and cannot track policies to virtual machine
creation or movement. This approach is leaving organizations open to
risk of cyberattacks and loss of critical business data. There is an
emerging need for “virtualization-aware” security solutions that monitor
intra-server communications flows and protect virtual resources.
Next-generation firewalls (NGFW) have emerged as the security solution
of choice for many virtualized data centers as they provide a security
architecture that can protect, scale, and evolve with virtualization
needs. ABI Research believes that there is a niche market for NGWF for
virtualized data centers, valued at US$375,000 in 2014. “NGFWs deliver
much more granular control than traditional firewalls by being
application and user aware, which in turn ensures better security
without impacting user productivity,” says Monolina Sen, ABI Research’s
Senior Analyst in Cybersecurity. Players like Trend Micro, Cisco,
Imperva, NTT Com Security, Centrify, Veeam Software, and others offer
innovative and interesting offerings in the data-center virtualization
security market.
These findings are part of ABI Research’s Cybersecurity
Technologies Market Research.