Facebook Live Transcript***
August 24th, 2017
Prakash Nagpal:
Hello everybody, my name is Prakash Nagpal. I am vice president of product marketing at Infoblox. I have the privilege today of being with Kanaiya Vasani, who is Vice President of SaaS services, corporate development and strategy at Infoblox. Looking forward to hearing his perspective on the market, how it has evolved, variants, how they impact our customers and Infoblox’s role in it. Kanaiya, thank you so much for being with us.
Kanaiya Vasani:
My pleasure.
Prakash Nagpal:
If you don’t mind Kanaiya, I’ll start off with some questions for you. I’ll start with: There are 34 billion devices that are going to be connected to the internet by 2020. 24 billion IoT devices, 10 billion traditional devices and how many zeroes are there in a billion, right? A lot. The other factor that all enterprises are thinking about is over 60% of them surveyed are focused on security, managing threats better. It’s estimated that a trillion dollars will … Corporations will pay over a trillion dollars to manage cyber threats by the year 2021 and over half the companies around the globe have adopted some kind of hybrid cloud model. How is all of this impacting customers, right, what are they doing to navigate these threats?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yeah look, I spend a lot of time with customers in my role, right, as trying to drive the whole SaaS transformation for us and engage with our customers, enabling SaaS information for customers. I think this whole change, this whole … the tsunami of devices that are coming online with IoT, all the changes that you see in the enterprise right now is really having a fundamental impact on enterprise networks in general, right, so, the networks have to handle a huge amount of traffic and a whole host in order of magnitude, maybe two orders of magnitude more devices so they need to be able to scale.
The second issue is just the enterprise has become so fluid. You talked about hybrid cloud. I am moving workloads into Amazon. I am moving workloads into Azure. I am moving some of them into my private data centers and I still have some workloads on IPAM so workloads, services, applications are moving. I’m consuming some services, a lot of services now through SaaS offerings, sales force and others. On the users side, I have users everywhere. I have mobile users, I have roaming users, I have people bringing their own devices on IPAM, all kinds of devices so the whole enterprise has become so fluid … And the third thing is dynamic, so it’s not like you move something someplace and it stays there. The workloads continue to move around, so what this has done is, it is putting a lot of stress on the enterprise network and core network services that you usually just provision and forgot about. Things like DNS, DHCP, IP address management, network access, load balancing … Those things, you thought you had it covered, it’s done, over. Some enterprises even managed all this using spreadsheets.
What they’re finding now is that this whole dynamic network that we have, the dynamic enterprise that we are in, you have to re-look at that core network service architecture and you have to build it from the ground up for scale. You need to make it secure and you need to make it much more dynamic. It has become this fundamental building block that you cannot ignore. You need to re-look at it. It become sort of the lifeline if you will, the bloodline that drives and enables everything else you need to do top. Whether it’s all the cloud stuff, the dynamic workplace stuff or even security. This becomes an essential component of the enterprise going further so we are having a lot of conversations with our customers around how we … I mean you know we are leaders in this whole DDI space so we are having these consultative dialogues with customers to see how we can help them transition into this new world.
Prakash Nagpal:
So it’s interesting. It seems like the common thread there is these devices, IP address management, it seems like there’s this massive data that companies need to navigate … Underlying all these things is massive data that’s being generated and they need to somehow navigate and make that useful. How are they doing that?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. Data is gonna be the key going forward because if you have a dynamic network environment you’re not gonna be able to manage all this manually, right? You hear all these terms, application driven networks. You hear about self-healing networks. You hear about self-driving networks. Basically what it says is really these networks have to be automated. The human element has to be limited. Providing oversight as opposed to doing all the manual work and the only way you do that is you need to instrument this whole infrastructure. Gather a whole bunch of data, do analytics around this data and then drive some automation in terms of how you manage this infrastructure. You should be monitoring the network and saying, “Hey look at my hitting certain thresholds in terms of capacity, do I need to dynamically add capacity to the network?”, “Am I running the risk of an outage because I am starting to see some, all the indications and warnings around what I see in my dashboard on the network.”
Now data becomes even more critical when you move to the security side of the house, right. Gone are the days … I mean if you think about signature based, rules based, firewalls, I mean they are historical relics now so every security solution is all about gathering data, analyzing data, looking for anomalies so data become even more critical when it comes to the security world.
Now look, one of the interesting things as I’ve spent more time with our customers is the traditional enterprise model, where you had an applications teams, you had a security team, you had a network team, that silo organizational structure itself is now being called into question. So, yeah traditionally the security guy, the networking guy would say, “hey, I’m responsible for setting up the network infrastructure and making sure that it’s up 24 by 7, five nights availability.”, all that good stuff. The security guy would come in and create sort of an umbrella, sort of an overlay if you will around this and secure this network. But what you’re finding now is not possible. The security person needs to know a lot about the networking infrastructure because there are vulnerabilities in the network that may impact the security architecture. The networking person has information that could help the security person in terms of accelerating remediation when they see security events.
I’ll give you an example. We used to traditionally sell to the networking buyer but increasingly our sale list to the security buyer because the networking buyer is saying, “Hey look, there are some DNS vulnerabilities that mister security guy, you need to come in and look at.” So we are now selling DNS security solutions to the security buyer because they do recognize the DNS, because it’s an open protocol is highly vulnerable … And then we say, “Hey look, this is all the data that we have on the DNS side of the house and the DHCP IPAM side of the house that I can make available to you to speed up remediation on security events that you may see.” So they are saying, “yeah that’s very interesting as well.”
So DNS security now has become an important and essential component in this whole defense and depth strategy that security buyers are driving. It’s all data but it’s data from a variety of different sources coming together and the network data and the context it can provide to the security buyer is becoming increasingly interesting. Another example there is, if you’re a security analyst and you’re sitting in front of a SIM console and you’re seeing this sea events … If I can tell you … There is an IP address that had an event … Now if you were able to extract information from the networking guy and say, “hey look, I need DHCP lease history around this IP address so I can pinpoint the device it is associated with … And oh let me go into my, from the IPAM, IP address management database, hey give me all the networking context around this … Which floor, which building is this device on, who is the owner of this device?” Now I can prioritize which events I want to go after first and it speeds up remediation and an instant response from me. So a lot of interesting stuff happening in the data world.
Prakash Nagpal:
Fascinating. So I have three observations based on what you said. One: we should create a factory that invents new terms and one of the terms you mentioned was DHCP lease history, so a little bit about that, that is really the ability to tell where the device was, what it connected to and so on. Right?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Correct.
Prakash Nagpal:
The second observation is around, you talked about how legacy security elements were looking at one aspect or the other and what is important is look at three aspects: reputation, signatures and behavior, all together.
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yes.
Prakash Nagpal:
And the third observation around silos. You talked about breaking down organizations silos or at least bridging silos using our technology. Do you think that the same technology can be used to bridge inter-organizational silos, where you’re talking about two different banks that incorporate to address the threats that are coming at them?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Absolutely. That is a very good point. So, if you look in the security domain right now … I mean it’s all about open APIs and sharing threat information, sharing indicators of compromise across the board and it starts all the way from the top. If you look at DHS, they have this AIS program, Automated Indicator Sharing program and the government’s saying, “anytime I learn something about a bad indicator I’m gonna let you guys know.” And then you have all these industry ISACs, where the financial services companies are coming together and saying, “okay, we’re gonna share any indicators of compromise or threat data that we have in individual organizations across the industry.” And then there is security vendors are also sort of spending a lot time building ecosystems. So you have folks like McAfee building the DXL bus, where windows can publish, subscribe security data which we are of course part of. So you’re seeing, there is this movement in the vendor community as well in terms of sharing data.
As you know Prakash, we have a threat intel platform builtin our DNS security solution and the core component of the core principle in this threat intel platform was it is a very open platform and like some of our competitors we can consume threat intel from a variety of different industries sources. We normalize it, we give you a curated fee that comes out of it but then that can be plugged into any other security device out there in the network in addition to our DNS firewall devices. But the whole notion is, you have to be very open if you want to be effective in this market … And there are still windows out there that try to do this whole window lock and they have this window locking mindset but honestly it just doesn’t fly in this world where the threat actors are just way too smart and a single organization is just not gonna have the resources and the smarts to preempt threats going forward. An open ecosystem, an open API based product world map is critical to how we view things here.
Prakash Nagpal:
That’s a really great point Kanaiya because when I talk to customers too, they talk about having 20 to 50 different security vendors and to have vendors that keep showing up and saying, “add my stuff too” versus a story that talks about how can I have all of these pieces work together is really critical. A really good point.
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yeah, look, I’ll give you an example. When we find something anomalus on the DNS side of the house … The interesting thing with DNS is all around transactions at an enterprise start life as a DNS query … So the interesting thing there is it gives you an … It could become an early warning system where you can start to notice something anomalus in DNS and you can immediately sound the alarms. So when we notice something we have ecosystem integrations with end point windows so we would alert them. We have ecosystem integrations with vulnerability scanning windows and we can alert them so they can start to take proactive action.
Again, the whole idea is staying one step ahead of the bad guys.
Prakash Nagpal:
Kanaiya, I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time but I have one last question for you. We’ve talked a lot about technology. How is this and the changes in technology, how is this impacting business models of vendors and the people purchasing these technologies?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yeah, So I think one of the things, Prakash, I’ve noticed is, if you look at mega trend in the industry it’s this whole notion of the shift to SaaS.
Prakash Nagpal:
SaaS being software as a service?
Kanaiya Vasani:
Software as a service. Applications are being consumed as SaaS. Security solutions are moving to SaaS. Networking solutions, network services are moving to SaaS as well because I think enterprises are recognizing that they don’t have the resources to just build infrastructure to keep with the dynamic changes that are happening in all these different segments of the network, whether it’s networking or security, and they are starting to trust windows or service provides a lot more in terms of managing some of this infrastructure for them. So SaaS has become important and from a business model standpoint, what that then entails is, this whole shift a CAPEX oriented business model to an OPEX oriented business model. Subscription is really the way things are floating. So we seeing a big transition when we talk to our customers. A big push from a pure CAPEX, let me just buy your software or your appliances up front, to hey I really want a subscription based offering from you and we are actively working with our customers to help them go through that transition right now.
Prakash Nagpal:
Excellent. Well, Kanaiya, thank you. Thank you for walking us through the trends, summarizing them from them on the impact the trends are having on networks around scale ability, agility and flexibility. Talking to us about the migration to software is a serious model, not only from a delivery perspective but even a purchasing behavior perspective. Tying it together and talking a little bit about how Infoblox is playing a part in all of this.
Kanaiya Vasani:
Yeah, my pleasure. It’s an exciting time to be in this business right now.