In part 1 of our 2015 Cyberthreat Defense Report blog, next-generation endpoint defenses and threat intelligence services were introduced as two emerging areas of interest that warrant attention from enterprise security and solution provider marketing teams in 2015. Now it’s time to reveal another pair of equally important trends, in this case pertaining to hyper-segmentation and the emergence of software-defined security.

Micro/hyper-segmentation. Segmentation for the purpose of establishing and enforcing differentiated policies has long been a standard security practice. The only catch is that doing so at other than a very coarse level has, at least until recently, been impractical due to compounding infrastructure cost and complexity. However, most major cloud computing platforms overcome these challenges, for example by natively incorporating their own software firewalls around every virtual machine. In turn, software-defined networking (SDN) enables extension of similar practices into non-cloud (i.e., physical, on-premises) networks. The result is a not too distant future where every networked resource can be treated to its own, individual security zone – an architectural approach that makes it exceedingly more difficult for hackers and automated threats to expand their footprint once they gain access to an environment.

Software-defined security. Following close on the heels of SDN, software-defined security holds the promise of revolutionizing both security infrastructure and operations. In the case of the former, the physical location of network security devices will become irrelevant as security teams gain the capability to logically pipe in required security services at any point in any application flow / communication path, as needed. As for security operations, the ability to leverage APIs to increasingly automate and orchestrate routine functions will free up security personnel for tasks that require greater expertise, such as security architecture, development of organization-specific analytics, and incident response.

Once again, to obtain further insights on these and other trends – or to develop compelling marketing content that capitalizes on them – just give us a shout.