Today’s TeleGeography Explains the Internet guest comes to the security world with a deep background in cloud and networks.
Joe DePalo is Chief Platform Officer at Netskope, and the ideal person to help us understand how and why location matters in network security.
We first identify how the network has changed over the past few years, gauging its impact on the threat landscape and network performance generally.
Also on the agenda: why middle-mile performance and security should be part of the equation, and how lessons learned from the challenges of creating CDNs are instructive about the modern issues in network security.
Finally, Joe offers a particularly interesting take on a question that comes up often on the podcast—what does it mean to have a WAN in this environment?
Catch the full interview below.
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Key Takeaways
The shift to an internet-first WAN, driven by cloud adoption, changes the security landscape and highlights the critical influence of geography.
The underlying internet infrastructure, including the last and middle mile, was originally designed for a very different purpose and is often inadequate to handle the demands of modern cloud security services, leading to issues with latency and performance.
Simply relying on existing internet connectivity or adding security on top of traditional overlay technologies can result in poor user experience, making it essential to consider the geographic location of users and applications when implementing security.
Many enterprises lack an understanding of their increasingly complex network, which impedes effective security and performance management.
The domain of enterprise network coverage is now vast and often outside their direct control, encompassing remote workers, various offices, and numerous cloud services beyond the major hyperscalers.
Organizations often underestimate the number of cloud services they use and have limited visibility into their underlying carrier mix and network paths.
Solutions that provide visibility and help deconstruct this complexity are necessary for enterprises to understand what they are dealing with before applying security measures effectively.
Purpose-built security network platforms are emerging to address the geographic challenges and limitations of the internet.
Unlike traditional internet providers or public clouds, which may lack the financial incentive to provide low-latency compute everywhere, these platforms focus on comprehensive global coverage, extensive peering, and running full compute at the edge to ensure optimal performance and security from any location.
Drawing lessons from previous infrastructure evolutions like CDNs, these platforms aim to overcome internet deficiencies and simplify the security architecture for enterprises.
Greg Bryan
Greg is Senior Manager, Enterprise Research at TeleGeography. He's spent the last decade and a half at TeleGeography developing many of our pricing products and reports about enterprise networks. He is a frequent speaker at conferences about corporate wide area networks and enterprise telecom services. He also hosts our podcast, TeleGeography Explains the Internet.
