Day 3/ Session

Future-proofing your Security Investment

Harmeet Singh Kalra, of Check Point talked about software blades and their role in security

Kalra began by talking about Check Point which he said is a global leader in firewall/VPN and in mobile data encryption protecting over 100,000 businesses, over 60 million users, had 100% of Fortune 100 as its customers and was totally focused on security. He then talked about the concept of a software blade which he believed was the next big thing in security. Today, Check Point’s product portfolio consists of unified gateways with a single security management console and a single endpoint security agent. Now it is introducing software blades that offer flexible security. A software blade is a building block of a security setup and it is independent, modular and managed centrally. He explained how this worked. You selected a container based on size (the number of cores), selected the software blades and created a system that was simple, flexible and secure. He added that you could create a library of software blades for network security, management, endpoint security etc. The benefits were total flexibility, breakthrough performance, low TCO and the ability to reuse infrastructure. Moreover there was no additional hardware, electricity consumption, rackspace, maintenance needed with this concept.

Kalra touched upon trends in virtualization quoting facts, figures and predictions made by Thomas Bittman, Vice President of Data Center Research at Gartner at the Data Center Conference 2008 in Las Vegas.

• By 2012, at least 14% of the infrastructure and operations architecture of Fortune 1000 companies will be internally managed and delivered much like a cloud-computing provider (private clouds)
• The installed base of VMs will grow more than 10x during 2007-2011
• By 2012, the majority of x86 server workloads will be running in a VM

He moved on to describe the top ten security threats & vulnerabilities that organizations had to look out for in 2009.

The first and foremost was virtualization vulnerabilities and the necessity of securing virtual systems. For security virtualization, Check Point offered VSX Gateways that were virtualized security gateways that enabled the creation of virtual systems—from five to hundreds—for deep cost savings and infrastructure consolidation. These were available in software and turnkey appliances and they included Firewall, VPN, Router and IPS technologies within a virtual network environment, on a single, scalable platform. Among other things, these gateways have been certified as Virtual Appliance by VMware for ESX server.

Kalra closed by presenting the assembled CIOs with a choice between running multiple point solutions from various vendors involving several projects, dedicated hardware, dedicated management or they could go with software blades from Check Point involving one project, multiple configurations and single management.