Clouds, SDNs, and Automation - Looking back 10 years

[deanwebb]

Remember 10 years ago when all this was pretty much about to start or just getting going? Well, it's time to look back and ask - how much have these techs changed what we used to do on the network and how much was able to stay the same?

For me, the cloud has absolutely done the most disruption in that the cloud environment itself is an SDN and is very amenable to automation. Costs aside, the ease of management in the cloud is a strong case for shifting up there. On-prem vendors have been scrambling to get cloud solutions together, and a fair number of them have some strong tools for the clouds, but they're also going head-to-head with cloud providers that push their own tools - Microsoft - and with vendors that started in the cloud, like Netskope and Zscaler.

I haven't seen much on-prem SDN. I have seen better automation on-prem, but it's typically limited to spinning up VMs and containers and running management tools like Cisco Prime.

What's everyone else seeing out there?

[icecream-guy]

unfortunately our network security group has been left out of the cloud, that's all managed by another team/contract.

[deanwebb]

^ That's very common and, sadly, I see those cloud teams having more in common with the development folks than with the networking people, especially when it comes to security. The biggest threats we have in the cloud are all the open ports, bad passwords, poor practices, shared accounts, and so on that people leave open... it's like they're used to running around in their on-prem underwear, thinking a firewall is always between them and the rest of the world. But, in fact, we can see EVERYTHING.

EVERYTHING.














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