Corporate network no longer a “walled garden:" WatchGuard

With the increased amount of virtualisation and Cloud adoption taking place, the role of security is not as clear cut as it used to be.

Businesses are hosting more and more IT offsite, and WatchGuard Asia Pacific vice-president, Scott Robertson, said non-core applications are also joining the exodus.

“We used to work in a ‘walled garden’ called the corporate network, where all of the applications and data sat on that network,” he said.

“Now we’re taking portions of it and putting it somewhere else.”

The issue now is that the walled garden businesses learned to protect is no longer in one location, and there is also an open line, namely the Internet, located in between.

Good business case

When businesses are looking at implementing a Cloud strategy, Robertson said security tends to come up early in discussions.

“Cloud is a capability that has been around for a while, but what’s new is the bandwidth and the capacity to access applications remotely,” he said.

Whenever a business is looking to embrace Cloud, Robertson said they first need to understand why this strategy should be embraced.

“Most business are doing it to try to scale their business, reduce costs, but if you look at it as an overarching message, it is to enable further efficiency and improve productivity,” he said.

When adopting the Cloud, Robertson adds it is important that businesses mitigate their risk.

A helping hand

Channel partners may struggle at times to engage a security discussion upstream, though Robertson said “upstream is where security really sits.”

“No one wants to be the next headline and the company that’s just lost their customer data,” he said.

For that reason, Robertson said it is critical that businesses start to take security seriously, as well as take the necessary steps to understand it as well.

Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.