It seems to happen all too often – something that’s ‘old’ is all of a sudden new again. And recently, that’s the case around converged infrastructure in which it’s a new name for an old idea. Converged Infrastructure has been surging due to the demands of cloud computing and in my latest SecurityWeek column titled, “Converged Infrastructure Implications for Email Security,” I shared the challenges behind the dominate email security paradigm, also weaving in what the remaining challenges are for enterprises once you a virtual appliance is added to the picture.
The key takeaways around Converged Infrastructure as it relates to email security include:
- Before cloud computing, the dominate paradigm for the delivery of email security infrastructure was the purpose-built email security appliance (physical server)
- With cloud computing, the infrastructure is migrated to a SaaS provider for Internet mail, however, there is still a place for an email security infrastructure for the management of internal email security.
- The data center is then converted to a cloud computing paradigm on a Converged Infrastructure computing fabric, everything is now virtualized and potentially changeable. This makes the old paradigm for email security with physical appliances obsolete.
- Now add the virtual appliance, as the email security infrastructure must be virtualized along with everything else, and the new paradigm is for virtualized appliances to implement email security.
- The virtual appliances brings the benefits of physical appliances but without the physical residence in the data center. The cloud now provides the compute infrastructure.
- With the virtual appliance, the remaining challenge is around the virtual email security appliances adapting to network topology changes.
The bottom line is that this trend toward Converged Infrastructure has important implications for the email security IT infrastructure and the Converged Infrastructure promises to bring an old paradigm to a new infrastructure. Companies benefit from the Converged Infrastructure paradigm because it locks in customers on their solutions without having IT buyers out there searching for the best of breed infrastructure.
Be sure to check out the full article here and as always, we look forward to your comments below.