Our first SecureDC twitter chat created some great industry dialog around security for Software Defined Networks (SDN) as well as using SDN to improve security. SDN is going through a similar hype cycle as seen with cloud and we feel that it's important to focus more on education now and broader collaboration, so that users can benefit from the tremendous potential SDN holds.

More Education, Less Buzz

We kicked off our conversation by asking what are the most pressing issues around SDN were. @Joltsik, Principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, felt that users are confused with so much buzz, yet there's little in the way of education.

@Raj_Samani, Chief Innovation Office at the Cloud Security Alliance and CTO at McAfee, went one step further indicating that greater transparency is also needed. However, @Jgreene3rd, Technical Lead for Data Center Security Technologies at Intel, noted that the upside of buzz is that it drives greater demand for availability, which in turn fuels education.

SDN and Improving Security

@KenSBeck, Principal Engineer at the Cisco Security Technology Group Office of the CTO, led an interesting discussion on how APIs for programming the network at network speed will allow security intelligence to be much more dynamic and eventually part of the network itself. @shl_eax_1, Technical Lead Engineer at Cisco Security Technology Group Office of the CTO, further noted how global visibility of the network hastens the speed with which security issues get resolved.

@fsmontenegro elaborated on how SDN security can enable more intelligent, granular and efficient response, and that SDN improves security by adding policy exceptions at the network layer with redirect flow. @vernonxt, SVP for ICT Research at IDC, honed in on SDN enabling better policy management. @AndiMann, Vice President at CA Technologies, speculated with automation enabling embedded policy and preventing random changes, shouldn't SDN be able to do the same.

SDN Impact on Regulatory Compliance

@alokmittal65, Chief of Staff for the Cisco Security Technology Group Office of the CTO, stressed the need for auditing, logging and monitoring of policy change events.

@Raj_Samani also noted that with greater proliferation of devices, the ability to achieve greater attestation on the endpoint becomes more challenging. @KenSBeck drew attention to leveraging network awareness of user, geo location, and device as contextual elements that can make attestations much more meaningful.

Wrapping Up

@KenSBeck, our host from the Office of the CTO at Cisco, closed with words of advice and a hint of what is in store.

Keep the dialog going! Follow us on @Secdatacenter#SecureDC and join the conversation on LinkedIn Secure Datacenter Trends. For additional SDN resources, be sure to register today for our SDN Learning Seminars.