Cyber-security company, F5 Networks, claims security, at the application layer, is essential in the increasing migration to public and private Cloud.
According to F5 Networks worldwide security expert, David Holmes, Australian businesses should particularly focus resources on application security.
He said Australia leads the way in using Cloud services and as a nation, has been more receptive in understanding that application security is where they should be focusing more of their budgets on.
Holmes attributed a 2015 report from the company, which showed that within Asia-Pacific, 45 per cent of businesses deploy between one and 200 applications, while 17 per cent deploy between 201 and 500 applications.
“Because customers have a particularly strong understanding about application security, the Australia channel is a great place to be selling intelligent designs or kits because people get it, and are more willing to spend on that level,” Holmes said.
He added that some of the best security architectures he has seen is in Australia and claimed this is fuelled by the nation's strong adoption of multiple Cloud services.
“Australia is leading the world in adopting new, hybrid architectures more than any other place. The best architectures we have seen in Australia are using multiple Cloud services, but the business will focus their security on-premise and their user identities will be in their own datacentre,” he continued.
According to Holmes, the old security posture was more focused on trust on a network level.
He said that as Cloud is accessible from everywhere, putting up an application is easy and hard to keep track of. He said many organisations don't know exactly how many applications they have and it is this that creates serious vulnerabilities in the new infrastructure.
Another challenge is visibility. Holmes said there is a global trend in encrypted traffic and many people struggle in understanding how to apply application security to invisible encrypted traffic.
He said it’s because of this that channel partners selling security should have a strong strategy.
“If a reseller is selling in the channel and they want to sell a next-generation firewall or a fire-eye, they absolutely have to have a strategy for SSL visibility. If you are a channel partner putting together a package without that strategy, you need to go back to the drawing board and re-think it,” he added.
