2010 was an interesting year for the network security space. There has been a resurgence in interest and budget projections for spending, largely for perimeter security. Part of this is a loosening of the budget purse strings, which is allowing frustrated network security folks to actually start dreaming about upgrading their perimeters. So there will be plenty of vendors positioning to benefit from the wave of 2011 spending.

What We Expect to See

There are four areas of interest at the show for network security:

  • Next Generation Firewall: Last year we talked about application awareness as absolutely critical to the next wave of network security devices. That capability — to build policies based on applications and users, rather than just ports and protocols — has taken the name next generation firewall. Unless a vendor has no interest in the enterprise market, they will be touting their next generation wares. Some of these will be available exclusively on slide decks in the booth, while other vendors will be able to show varying levels of implementation. While you’ve got an SE at your disposal at the show, ask them some pointed questions about how their application categorization happens and what the effective throughput is for their content oriented functions. It should be pretty clear to what degree their gear is next-generation, or if it’s really just an IPS bolt-on.
  • More marketecture: As these new generation capabilities start to hit, they present the opportunity for a fairly severe disruption in the status quo of vendor leadership. So what do the incumbents do when under attack, without a technical response? Right, they try to freeze the market with some broad statement of direction that is light on detail and heavy on hyperbole. It wouldn’t surprise us to see at least one of the RSA keynoters (yeah, those who pay EMC $250K for the right to pontificate for an hour) talk about a new initiative to address all ills of everything.
  • Virt suck: The good news is that a bunch of the start-ups talking about virtualization security hit the wall and got acquired by big network security. So you probably won’t see many folks talking about their new widget to protect inter-VM network traffic. What you will hear is every vendor on the floor playing up the advantages of their shiny new virtual appliances. It’s just like the box you pay $50K for, but you get to use your own computing power in a horribly wasteful fashion. You know how attractive it is to slice out a chunk of your computers to run IPS signatures. It’s like these folks want to bring us back to 1995 and because it runs on ESX, it’s all good. Not so much.
  • Full packet capture maturing: Yes, this is a carry-over from last year. The fact remains that we still have a lot of work to do in order to streamline our incident response processes and make them useful. So you’ll see folks stacked up to learn about the latest and greatest packet capture and the associated analysis. These tools are now starting to bring some cool visualization and even malware analysis to the table. Check them out because as the market matures (and prices come down), this is a technology you should be looking at.

Later today we’ll be posting the sections on Email/Web Content Security, as well as Data Security. So stay tuned for that…

Share: