Networking, Security, and Visibility: How the Next Evolution of Technology will Serve the CIO

Saddled by the complexities of IT, today’s CIOs are dreaming of a new level of holistic visibility that permeates the entire global IT environment, crossing both network and security domains and enabling smart automation. These capabilities are the springboard to the future and the next evolution of networking technologies. While many IT leaders have heard of the promises of “self-adjusting networks,” most are scratching their heads when it comes to blazing a path to get there.

The key to building self-adjusting networks is the convergence of three critical functions: networking, security, and visibility.

As core foundations, these three elements must come together in order to accelerate the pace of digital transformation in IT departments. This alliance of capabilities is what CIOs (and network service providers) need in order to innovate and meet early prerequisites for self-adjusting networks.

Specifically, the networks of the future must be standardized on a single, secure architecture that combines networking, security, and delivers analytical insights. Security analytics should be built directly into the corporate WAN dashboard, providing the visibility for effective management and early threat mitigation.

Future networks should offer holistic and correlated visibility across both network and security domains, as well as provide advanced network segmentation that enables zero-trust security strategies. With these advances, enterprise IT teams will have a new clarity into network endpoints whether they are on-premise or in the cloud.

If you think this is the distant future. Think again. Self-adjusting networks are just around the corner. Network service providers are already making investments to help CIOs reach these new heights.

Recently, Masergy announced Secure Hybrid Networking for enterprises, which serves as a critical step toward self-adjusting networks. Simply put, Secure Hybrid Networking integrates key functions from Masergy’s managed detection and response (MDR) security solution into our software defined networking solution portfolio, delivering visibility across the network–from on-premise endpoints to the cloud and everywhere in between. It’s groundbreaking in the industry, because it brings security analytics into the customer’s network dashboard.

Trends Highlight the Need for Tighter Alignment

If you haven’t read Masergy’s predictions for 2019, we’re seeing a lot of industry dynamics uniting the worlds of networking and security, which is why Masergy is adapting to these developments. Consider these business trends that are top of mind at Masergy:

• Today, you can’t have an executive-level discussion about networking without bringing up security. Likewise, it’s hard to talk security without talking networking.
• There are strong interconnections between digital transformation, the enterprise network, and security–they work successfully in triangulation.
• The widespread adoption of SD-WAN over public connectivity naturally becomes a security conversation, as public Internet connections open security concerns.
• CIOs/CISOs are using more network segmentation, and zero-trust security strategies continue to gain traction.
• IT teams are aligning their segmentation strategies across both the network and security operations, using multi-VRFs for security monitoring.

Clearly, the two areas of networking and security are being woven together, which is why we recognize that our enterprise customers need more aligned capabilities. Considering these waves of change, Masergy is in a perfect position to respond and deliver. We’re uniting three core areas of our expertise: networks, security, and analytics.

Our engineering team takes the approach that new isn’t on its way–we’re making it happen right now. We aim to help our customers arrive first at the landmark of self-adjusting, secure networks.

If you want a digital transformation partner who will keep your networking and security technologies on the leading edge of innovation, look to the visionaries at Masergy.