According to Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO, Dell Technologies, software-defined data centres will become “pretty much de facto standard” in the next 5 to 10 years, speaking at the Dell EMC World 2017 in May.
On face value, this might not seem like a revolutionary prediction. After all, the IT infrastructure landscape has undergone a fundamental transformation in the last decade, with virtualised hardware, network function virtualisation (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) decoupling the hardware and network infrastructure from the application, and the application itself being increasingly located anywhere across the cloud.
The era of dedicated hardware-based solutions would indeed seem to be over.
However, there is one area of the ICT infrastructure that remains rooted in the past and poses a fundamental risk to the efficiency, agility and cost savings businesses can gain from hardware and network virtualisation. And crucially, is fundamentally flawed from a pure security perspective: the hardware-based Session Border Controller (SBC).
Vendors’ failure to reflect the function driven model embraced by the vast majority of organisations is a problem. How can a company quickly spin up new cloud based voice applications, for example? Where does the SBC fit into a decoupled infrastructure? How can a one-off investment / deployment possibly mitigate the evolving threat landscape?
The hardware-based SBC is not only compromising the evolution of the IT infrastructure but is adding untenable business risk. And those vendors that are offering software-based SBCs are doing so based on a pricing model that undermines the value businesses – SMEs in particular – can gain from the move to VoIP.
Instead, the latest generation of virtual, cloud-based SBCs – deployed either directly within a customer environment as NFV, or through a service provider as an SDN capability – offers organisations the ability to quickly, easily, and cost-effectively achieve a base level of security that can also be overlaid with advanced functionality to protect against the latest security threats.A hardware-based SBC cannot go into the cloud. It sits in complete contrast to today’s software-defined, virtualised IT infrastructure. In contrast, a software-defined, cloud SBC provides a security solution for any size of business that matches the flexibility of the cloud along with continuous updates and collaboration that responds to and protects against emerging threats.
A hardware-based SBC cannot go into the cloud. It sits in complete contrast to today’s software-defined, virtualised IT infrastructure. In contrast, a software-defined, cloud SBC provides a security solution for any size of business that matches the flexibility of the cloud along with continuous updates and collaboration that responds to and protects against emerging threats.
Paul German, CEO at Certes Networks
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