The Evolving Endpoint
Both the number and the variety of endpoints that must be secured have been expanding rapidly in the past few years, especially with the upward spiral in mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Gartner famously estimated that more than 26 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020; Cisco claims it will be 50 billion, and Intel says it will be 200 billion. Take your pick; the point is the same — an exponential increase in the volume and diversity of endpoints is underway.
From a security perspective, most concerning is that many of these interconnected devices do not have a security profile or a security agent resident within them that the enterprise can use to validate security. From a network perspective, the enterprise must provide a consistent security policy across all of these new and emerging form factors that allows the scalability and visibility to adhere to and adapt to new security controls.