2013/12/17 Infonetics survey: Cloud and data center operators investing heavily in security, rate top vendors

Campbell, CALIFORNIA, December 16, 2013—Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its 2013 Cloud and Data Center Security Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey, for which data center and cloud operators were interviewed about their strategies for deploying security in the data center and their ratings of security vendors.

“The primary concern right now among service providers operating data centers is getting the security infrastructure to match the performance of the network infrastructure,” notes Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research. “When it comes to protecting data centers, nothing drives service providers to invest in security solutions more than the performance requirements driven by infrastructure upgrades and the increasing size and scale of attacks.”

Wilson adds: “The recent disclosures about the NSA stealing data from prominent data centers are causing a new wave of panic, forcing cloud and data center providers to feverishly shore up their networks and systems.”

• Due to infrastructure and interface upgrades, many operators surveyed are planning serious spending on good old-fashioned firewalls; DDoS prevention systems are also a top priority
• By 2015, nearly 2/3 of survey respondents will need firewalls that support between 100G and 499G, and another 30% anticipate needing over 500G
• For respondents deploying virtual security appliances, the drivers have shifted away from visibility and management functions to security
• Though operators are looking at the impact of SDN (software-defined networking) on security deployments, it is not yet heavily driving security spending
• Arbor, Cisco, Juniper, Check Point, Fortinet, and McAfee are viewed by operator respondents as key data center/cloud vendors, although there is no clear leader
• Many respondents are also evaluating products from F5 and Palo Alto Networks