After spending several decades in this industry, I have seen growth in many different security products and in many different areas. All the while, I’ve questioned whether specific technologies were offering real value or were just over-marketed to create more revenue opportunities for investors. As we have seen repeatedly, categories of security products blossom in many different ways.
So many vendors, so much technology. Where do we go from here?
Let’s take a look at the firewall and endpoint protection marketplace. First off, look at what has happened to firewalls in the last 20 years. We have gone from the original stateful multi-layer inspection firewalls to application firewalls, from north-south traffic to east-west traffic, to firewalls in the Cloud and beyond. This migration has brought us from the start of managing a few firewalls to managing hundreds to now having specialized change management and attack modeling solutions that address firewall topologies, not to mention the requisite operational expertise that we need to keep things running optimally on a continual basis.