Software-Defined Security Poised to Disrupt Security Appliance Market

Branch office networks are proving to be one of the weakest links in many enterprise organizations. In the 2013 Gartner report "Bring Branch Office Network Security Up to the Enterprise Standard," analyst Jeremy D'Hoinne wrote that "30 percent of advanced targeted threats — up from less than 5 percent today — will specifically target branch offices as an entry point."

The attack landscape and threat vectors have evolved since that report was published — branch security architectures for the most part have not. While point security appliances, such as next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), unified threat management (UTM) devices and software overlays in branch routers still rule the day when it comes to protecting branch perimeter security, recent advancements in network function virtualization (NFV) are allowing the exact same security features found in NGFWs and UTMs to be served via software as virtualized network functions (VNFs). In this slideshow, Versa Networks looks at eight reasons why this new world of software-defined security is poised to disrupt proprietary security appliance makers.