ExtraHop predicts an IT security shakeup

“When we started ExtraHop seven years ago, IT was on the precipice of moving from 1 GbE to 10 GbE networks. Now, we’re looking at a jump from 10 GbE to 40 GbE and even 100 GbE networks,” said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. “With this move, we’re going to see an exponential increase in the scale, complexity, and dynamism of IT environments. In order to manage this leap, expect to see enterprise IT begin demanding not only best-of-breed solutions, but seamless integration between these systems.”

Experts at ExtraHop offer the following predictions for IT in 2015:

Heartbleed and Shellshock are just the beginning. Zero-day attacks happen fairly regularly these days, but the scope and scale of both Heartbleed and Shellshock, as well as their proximity to each other, were a wake-up call for many IT organisations. “In my nearly 20 years of experience working in enterprise software and network engineering, these are two of the most serious threats I’ve seen. I’d go so far as to say that they are among the top five most significant zero-day events of all time,” said Rothstein.

These events, coupled with a wave of high-profile breaches – from Edward Snowden at the NSA, to Target and Michael’s, to the United States Postal Service – over the past 18 months, should indicate more is to come. With the increasingly sophisticated and pervasive nature of today’s threats, expect to see enterprise IT organisations step up their security game.

Hot competition in public cloud sparks a race to woo enterprises. When Google scooped AWS before the re:Invent show by announcing a significant investment in public and hybrid cloud, the stakes in the public cloud game got exponentially higher. Even though Google has some ground to make up on entrenched players, including AWS and Azure, this move clearly raised the stakes. To keep Google in a game of catch-up and to woo more large enterprise customers, expect AWS, Azure, and other public cloud providers to introduce capabilities that enable full-scale IT operations management (ITOM). With deeper visibility into public cloud infrastructures, enterprises might just be willing to dive into cloud in 2015.

Healthcare embraces Big Data in a big way. Big Data has proven itself an incredibly powerful tool across multiple industries. In 2015, expect to see the healthcare industry finally embrace Big Data in a big way as new platforms enable richer healthcare analysis while maintaining high standards for data security and integrity. Big data initiatives to streamline patient flow in the emergency room, track disease outbreaks in real time, and better understand population health dynamics are just a few of the many events we expect to see get underway.

Customers take back control and demand an open approach to data. As organisations across all sectors become increasingly data driven, the days of vendor data lock-in are numbered. Platforms that only enable enterprises to access and view data through one lens will either adapt or be phased out as businesses recognise the insights they can get by correlating data across systems for great context and clarity. In 2015, expect to see not only a major push among best-of-breed vendors to offer simplified integration, but a big uptick in the number of sophisticated, schema-less distributed datastores like MongoDB and Elasticsearch that allow enterprises to pool all of their data in one central repository.
Clarity emerges around IT Operations Analytics. In Q4 2014, Gartner took its first significant step toward clearly defining the emerging IT Operations Analytics category. Segmenting the market into “Little ITOA” and “Big ITOA”, Gartner took critical first steps toward categorising not only the diverse technologies that fit within the broad parameters of the sector, but the types of buyers (and the relative maturity) to implement these solutions. In 2015, expect to see further refinement of the category as IT buyers press Gartner and other experts on technologies that deliver the IT visibility necessary for more streamlined and efficient operations across the business. To learn more about designing and building an open ITOA architecture, request the white paper.