Attackers require only one success to gain entrance to the entire data center; a breach is typically “game over.” Due to the complex and dynamic nature of modern data centers, along with very high traffic rates, organizations face significant challenges in gaining visibility into application communications and putting proper controls in place to secure east-west (server-to-server) traffic.
Such traffic now represents over 80 percent of all traffic inside the data center.
This means that data center security architecture must be re-evaluated in order to meaningfully address security, shifting focus to application-layer visibility, granular micro-segmentation, real-time detection and automated response.
An effective approach must secure a heterogeneous, dynamic environment with extremely heavy traffic rates.