Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017
Software-defined networking (SDN) is generally a means to simplify the management of networks in the data center. But in the case of Big Switch Networks, it’s also a platform for delivering an IT monitoring application. Today, Big Switch Networks announced that it is extending that IT monitoring capability to create a BigSecure Architecture through which IT organizations can leverage IT monitoring and SDNs to combat Terabit-scale attacks on their networks.
Prashant Gandhi, vice president of product management for Big Switch Networks, says BigSecure Architecture, developed to enable IT organizations to more ably respond to a spike in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, is designed to strengthen the DMZ that most IT organizations create at the edge of their data center networks using a Big Monitoring Fabric that Big Switch previously developed.
“The goal is to leverage our technologies to defend the DMZ in event of a large-scale attack,” says Gandhi.
Via REST application programming interfaces (APIs), Gandhi says Big Monitoring Fabric can be used to programmatically invoke third-party infrastructure in the event of an attack to better secure the overall IT environment. In addition, the BigSecure Architecture makes it possible to dynamically bring additional compute resources located on-premises or in the cloud online to combat DDoS attacks.
Big Switch Networks also announced today that its monitoring tools have been extended to support cloud-native applications based on containers such as Docker.
As a provider of an SDN platform, Big Switch Networks has been an advocate for making use of open switches that enable IT organizations to deploy third-party SDN software as they see fit inside the data center. The Big Switch Monitoring Fabric along with the BigSecure Architecture are intended to essentially provide access to a compelling set of applications that would provide an incentive for IT organizations to more aggressively adopt SDN technologies.
Naturally, it’s not clear to what degree a security crisis might drive SDN adoption. But the one thing that is for certain is that legacy approaches to securing the data center are clearly no longer up to the task.
