According to Gartner, the growing importance of public clouds is expected to result in the US government declaring them a critical national infrastructure.
“The popularity and increased adoption of cloud-based security services, albeit at different degrees, will influence the shape of future security marketplaces,” said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.
“Deployments of virtualisation, and its replacing of traditional physical hardware platforms, are expected to impact the deployment model of future network security capabilities, which are expected to be based increasingly on virtual security appliances.”
By 2015, 20% of the VPN/firewall market will be deployed in a virtual switch on a hypervisor rather than a physical security appliance, according to Garner. Thus the procurement of Physical network security appliances will be curtailed.
Hypervisor providers are moving firewall offerings from the data centre to the network edge. This could be key for new network firewall players leveraging hypervisor technologies to gain firewall market share outside of the data centre, the analyst pointed out.
“Growth in the firewall market could come from virtual players,” said Eric Ahlm, research director at Gartner.
“To date, the virtual firewall market has been limited to data-centre-class firewalls, which make up the minority of the total firewall market. A push from the virtual providers to bring their technology to the edge could be a key accelerator to the virtual switch market growth.
“Enabling the key benefits of virtualised servers, while not compromising security, is becoming a key requirement for network data-centre-class firewalls while transportability of network firewall controls outside of a customer’s data centre to a third-party provider is essential to customers using these providers for more critical systems.”
Gartner warns that by 2016, as the economy becomes heavily reliant on public cloud infrastructure for everyday computing activities, cloud services disruptions will pose greater risks to the overall economy and eventually become a threat to national security in the form of economic disruption.
“Public cloud services providers will need to comply with critical infrastructure protection mandates for systems outside the scope of just federal government use under the FedRAMP program (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program),” said Lawrence Pingree, research director at Gartner.
“Security technology providers will need to prepare their technologies in order to address potential mandates for critical infrastructure protection of public cloud environments. Providers that lack the ability to offer compliant security controls to address critical infrastructure protection mandates will likely face sales difficulties in cloud environments and may be filtered from shortlists based on emerging critical infrastructure protection requirements.”
