{"id":49840,"date":"2018-07-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/distributed-networks-and-the-challenge-of-security\/"},"modified":"2018-11-20T16:35:36","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T16:35:36","slug":"distributed-networks-and-the-challenge-of-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techopedia.com\/distributed-networks-and-the-challenge-of-security\/2\/33307","title":{"rendered":"Distributed Networks and the Challenge of Security"},"content":{"rendered":"
The days of the desk are over. With both enterprises and startups focusing on agility and mobility, we are finding ourselves increasingly becoming active where the action is. For startups, this can mean hustling and traveling around the globe in search for opportunities. For enterprises, this could mean empowering employees to become productive anywhere they are.<\/p>\n
Consider how Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX (and serial entrepreneur who counts PayPal<\/a> as a success story), does not actually have a permanent place for his own desk. Oft considered eccentric by the media, Musk has said he would often have sleeping bags stowed in conference rooms, and that he spends most of his time on the factory floor. “I move my desk around to wherever the most important place is in the company at that time,” cites BGR<\/a>.<\/p>\n Not everyone is an Elon Musk, although certainly anyone can relate with the potential benefits that mobility can offer for any business. It’s not only the proverbial traveling salesman who gets to benefit from anywhere-access to their data and applications, however. According to recent statistics, at least 91 percent of corporate employees are using mobile apps<\/a> relevant to their work. Almost half of large enterprises provide apps to at least half of their employees.<\/p>\n After the turn of the century, the concept of BYOD – or bring your own device<\/a> – started to become an attractive proposition for organizations due to their productivity and cost advantages. Today, the luster of BYOD has faded off a bit, no thanks to the security and compatibility issues that businesses have had to face.<\/p>\n According to recent insights<\/a>, 39 percent of businesses with a BYOD policy have encountered malware<\/a>, and an additional 35 percent are unsure or have not surveyed their employees’ devices for malicious apps.<\/p>\n For those that have encountered security breaches<\/a>, 72 percent said that these involved data leakage and loss<\/a>. Fifty-six percent cite unauthorized access to their corporate systems, and 54 percent say their users have downloaded unsafe apps or content.<\/p>\n Security is mostly a nightmare for businesses that employ BYOD or mobility policies because of the perceived difficulty in maintaining security for a distributed network<\/a>. Before the days of the cloud<\/a>, a company could keep its server<\/a> infrastructure inside a secure room under lock and key and keep all traffic filtered and monitored through a firewall<\/a>. When data centers<\/a> and off-premises infrastructures were in fashion, enterprises could use MPLS, or Multiprotocol Label Switching<\/a>, to route traffic across their network with little to no compromise on speed and performance.<\/p>\n However, with the rise of cloud services<\/a> – and even today’s decentralized blockchain<\/a>-powered technologies – the question of security becomes even more pressing, especially for organizations that have their data on the cloud, with multitudes of endpoints<\/a> like laptops, smartphones, and other devices, accessing this data from multiple points. (Want to learn more about what blockchain is? Check out An Introduction to Blockchain Technology<\/a>.)<\/p>\n To address the need for enhanced security amid decentralization, the answer seems to lie in decentralization, too. An emerging trend involves deploying security through the cloud. For enterprises, this could involve a firewall as a service<\/a> or FWaaS, which is defined as “a firewall delivered as cloud-based service that allows customers to partially or fully move security inspection to a cloud infrastructure.”<\/p>\n A decentralized cloud-based deployment, such as one deployed over an FWaaS solution, would mean the ability to secure traffic flowing from and to endpoints like smartphones, laptops, tablets, and such devices, even when these are directly connected through the internet. This is in contrast with having to tunnel in through a VPN<\/a>, which usually takes a performance hit and which can be expensive.<\/p>\n One solution in particular involves connecting all disparate cloud providers<\/a> into a single and secure software-defined wide-area network<\/a> (SD-WAN). Such a software-based or logical firewall<\/a> is said to be “available anywhere, seamlessly scales to address any traffic workload, enforces unified policy, and self-maintained by a cloud provider.” Through this deployment, an organization only has to manage a single global firewall instance that can scale according to traffic volume and devices connected.<\/p>\nBYOD Has Gone Mainstream<\/span><\/h2>\n
Decentralization as an Answer<\/span><\/h2>\n