By Dr. Cahit Jay Akin, CEO and co-founder of Mushroom Networks

Centralized Delivery of Cyber Security

The IT industry has seen various repeat cycles of architectures that swing towards distributed approaches followed by a complete reversal towards centralized approaches. Various factors such as value-price ratios in computing, storage and networking have affected these trends over the last few decades. I believe we are approaching the peak of another focus on centralized architectures, which suggests a distributed trend may be just around the corner. But until then, let's look at the year ahead, shall we?

With everything cloud, we have seen centralized architectures peak in 2019. Servers, applications and content are all in centralized clouds. Networking is no different with the SD-WAN approach, which by definition accomplishes centralized management of branch office network appliances.

In 2020, when SD-WAN meets cyber security -- an unavoidable marriage - centralized architectures again will take center stage (pun intended). If SD-WAN can securely relay all traffic through a centralized cloud location, why do you need to replicate various security services in every single enterprise branch? Instead you can implement a single cloud-based UTM (Unified Threat Management) that has access and control over all the inbound/outbound traffic from the branches. The implicit assumption with this cloud- delivered UTM is the "access" and "control" of all the branch office traffic, which is where SD-WAN comes into play. SD-WAN addresses the last-mile gap in the cloud-delivered security proposition by creating a stateful firewall at the branch and relaying all inbound and outbound traffic to the outside world through encrypted and performance-optimized overlay tunnels going through the cloud-delivered UTM gateways.

In 2020, we will start seeing enterprises moving towards more centralized security postures. More specifically, their cyber security applications and UTM services will move to, and be delivered from, central locations, either from their data centers or from the cloud as "security as a service" (SECaaS). This trend will further fuel the adoption of SD-WAN as the preferred last-mile solution for secure and high-performance networking.

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About the Author

Dr. Cahit Jay Akin is the CEO and co-founder of Mushroom Networks,  https://www.mushroomnetworks.com , a long-time supplier of SD-WAN infrastructure for enterprises and service providers. Prior to Mushroom Networks, Dr. Akin spent many years as a successful venture capitalist. Dr. Akin received his Ph.D. and M.S.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey. Dr. Akin has worked on technical and research aspects of communications for over 15 years including authoring several patents and many publications. Dr. Akin was a nominee for the Most Admired CEO award by San Diego Business Journal.