NetEvents APAC Press Summit ,Thailand - Day 2 Highlights

Datacentre transformation “changes economies and business models” claims John McHugh at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

2-day Summit climaxes with visionary advice for surviving 2012

November 22nd, Phuket, Thailand: John McHugh gave the closing keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Press Summit at the Indigo Pearl, Phuket, Thailand today. Taking a year of challenging and insightful presentations from NetEvents summits across the globe during 2011, McHugh distilled the essence of what will become critical issues for CIOs in Asia over the next few years. His advice rounded off the 2-day conference which included debates on current industry issues and trends plus round table press and analyst briefings attended by an audience of top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and others.

“The trend towards datacentre transformation is inexorable - it will change economies and business models", said McHugh, counted among network world’s “top 50 most powerful people in networking” and known for his insight and sharp analysis of trends. "This past year, business leaders have worked in an environment full of challenges for the future. They will be thinking about risk," he said, arguing that IT was or should be transformational, especially given the growth of new end-user devices that offer new ways of workforce provisioning. On storage, he said: "we are feasting on more information – it’s important because the CIO needs to lead the strategy around information”.

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Closing-Keynote-transcript.pdf

The day began with Ian Keene, Vice President, Gartner introducing a HEAD 2 HEAD challenge between another of this year’s hottest Silicon Valley start-ups, Arista Networks, and three of the biggest global names in networking – Brocade, Extreme and HP – with a multimillion dollar virtualisation deal on the table – who takes the prize? This was an key opportunity for Arista – one of the hottest new names in Silicon Valley – choosing the NetEvents Summit as the launch pad into the APAC market for their Extensible Operating System (EOS™) based platform. Douglas Gourlay, VP, Arista Networks, emphasised the importance of openness: "People don't want a large, flat, layer-two network, and smart network engineers don't want to build or operate them”. He introduced EOS as a ground-breaking network operating system with single-image consistency across hardware platforms, and modern core architecture enabling in-service upgrades and application extensibility.

Other key highlights:

- John McHugh, CMO & VP, Brocade, hit back with: "our presentations are like our networks - faster than Arista!" He went on to argue: "80% of network traffic will be going east-west, not north-south as the network was designed to work. Brocade’s fabric gets rid of one aggregation layer to save power, and consolidate your edge layer to create a universal touch point for most of your datacentre devices."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks, said: "Everything is converging on Ethernet with no more separate network technologies for HPC, SANs and data."

- Erik Papir, Worldwide Director, HP, said: "You need to look at the overall infrastructure in the datacentre not just the network. Compute power and storage are going to be critical to enable the instant-on enterprise."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Head-2-Head-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Arista-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Brocade-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-Extreme-Networks-H2H-presentation.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-HP-H2H-presentation.pdf

The second session Ethernet's role in the Cloud, was introduced and chaired by Matt Walker, Principal Analyst, Ovum. Key highlights included: highlights:

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "How do you take things like group identities into the cloud?"

- Deb Dutta, VP Asia-Pacific, Brocade: "You need a cloud ID that allows you to demarcate your domain in the cloud and migrate from one SP to another."

- Nan Chen, President, MEF said it was “working on an ID standard so you can classify VMs and assign them priorities."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateII-presentation.pdf

Session III – From Desktop to Smart Devices – implications for infrastructure, management & security – was introduced and chaired by Tim Dillon, AVP Asia Pacific End User & Mobility Research, IDC. Key highlights included:

- Jonathan Andresen, product and solutions director APAC, Blue Coat Systems: "Cloud security is the first line of defence. Catch malware in the cloud and you don't let it into your network."

- Shehzad Merchant, VP of Technology, Extreme Networks: "Security should be multi-level and omni-present."

- Shara Evans, CEO, Market Clarity: "End-user devices are insecure because they get left in taxis. So the network needs to understand who the user is, as they may not be authentic."

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-transcript.pdf

http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/20111117-DebateIII-presentation.pdf

NetEvents contact:

Helen Whitworth

Tel: +44 (0)870 760 6464

Email: helenw ‘at’ netevents.org

NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 1 - November 16th.

From bad boy hacker to founder and CTO of Silicon Valley “hot start-up” Palo Alto Networks – Nir Zuk launches NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit

“Creative innovation on the right side of the law” is theme of Day One keynote

November 16^th , Phuket, Thailand: Today’s opening keynote at NetEvents 2011 APAC Summit introduced the founder and CTO of one of this year’s most talked-about Silicon Valley start-ups.

CTO of Palo Alto Networks Nir Zuk's keynote speech, entitled Creative innovation on the right side of the law, highlighted the complexity of the IT security problems facing enterprises today. He explained how hackers were becoming highly professional, financially motivated, and are able easily to penetrate the perimeter defences of the corporation.

"It takes just five steps," said Zuk, as he detailed the way that hackers target individual employees using social media, and persuade them to open a back door into the enterprise network by downloading an infected document that appears to contain information about one of their hobbies or interests.

Zuk said that it takes security companies two months to respond to such attacks because they are not widespread but highly targeted.

"If it only happens once, security vendors will not find it," Zuk said. "And even then it can take a week or more to fix. Every executable is a suspect, and there aren't enough security researchers in the world to fix all the vulnerabilities."

Zuk said that his company's firewall technology fixes the problem because it looks at all documents and executables in a virtual machine and watches for malware-like behaviour. "We do it in software in a datacentre and generate signatures for each piece of malware," Zuk said. "We can then block it within an hour."

Zuk created some of the first computer viruses before going straight and laying the foundations for stateful inspection, a technique now used by all firewalls, and intruder prevention systems, which offer inline protection for enterprise networks.

Following the opening plenary sessions, an audience including press and analysts representing more than 70 publications in 15 countries across the Asia Pacific region participated in a series of briefings with top execs from Arista Networks, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Fortinet, Blue Coat Systems, HP Networking, MEF, Niometrics, Sourcefire, UIH, IDC, Gartner, Analysys Mason, Market Clarity, Ovum, Forrester Research and many others.

A list of the NetEvents APAC Press Summit Day 1 Transcripts, Presentations and Photos can be downloaded from this URL: http://www.netevents.org/events/binaries/Thailand2011/NetEvents-APAC-Press-Summit-Nov-2011-Day1-URLs.pdf

NetEvents APAC Press Summit - Day 1 highlights.

Keynote: Nir Zuk, CTO, Palo AltoNetworks

Palo Alto Networks' CTO Nik Zuk opened NetEvents' first visit to Thailand, the event being held in a hotel on the beach in Phuket. Amid tropical vegetation and humidity, Zuk highlighted the IT security problems facing today's enterprises. They were characterised, he said, by the fact that malware authors were no longer disaffected geeks but serious people targeting specific individuals inside specific corporations with the aim of breaching perimeter defences to steal money and corporate IP.

It takes five steps, Zuk said. The malware persuades an end user to open a document, using a technique known as spear fishing -- this means using information from sites such as LinkedIn and FaceBook to find information about an individual who works for a particular organisation. They are sent an infected document which they are persuaded to open. This then downloads an executable that installs itself and opens up a back channel to the hacker, who can access that machine and through it, the rest of the organisation.

Zuk reckoned that it takes security companies two months to respond to such attacks because they are not widespread but highly targeted.

"If it only happens once, security vendors will not find it," Zuk said. "And even then it can take a week or more to fix. Every executable is a suspect, and there aren't enough security researchers in the world to fix all the vulnerabilities."

He claimed that his company's firewall technology fixes the problem because it looks at all documents and executables in a virtual machine and watches for malware-like behaviour. "We do it in software in a datacentre and generate signatures for each piece of malware," Zuk said. "We can then block it within an hour."

Tim Dillon: Cyber-attacks

After questions to Zuk from NetEvents' editorial director Manek Dubash and from the floor, the agenda stayed with security, this time led by IDC analyst Tim Dillon, who talked about cyber-attacks.

Dillon outlined how online identity was now the front line for security, while credit card details -- once the malware authors' equivalent of gold dust -- were now worth very little. The problem said Dillon is that the sheer volumes of data are flooding security vendors, with some seven zettabytes expected to exist by 2014. "The environment today is trillions of things, billions of users, and millions of applications," he said.

A question from the floor opened the issue of whether the enterprise perimeter is dead from a security perspective. Panel member Eric Chan of Fortinet said that perimeter security is the first line of attack and cited the attacks on Sony's website as an example. Mike Haro of Palo Alto Networks said that web application firewalls are not a total solution as you need to understand what the traffic is. Leon Ward of SourceFire said that application traffic has changed and that the visibility and context of that traffic are the important issues.

Discussing the importance of automation of malware analysis, all the technology vendors said that automation played a vital part. They also agreed that trust relationships were changing, and that an adaptive agile approach was needed to manage the ever-changing tide of malware.

Paul Sumner: e-Government and the cloud

Paul Sumner, senior manager at analyst firm Analysys Mason, then presented research on e-Government and the cloud, looking at the drivers for change, and strategies to address challenges.

He argued that governments are looking to the cloud to lower costs, improve services and gain greater insight into their citizens. Their challenges are to decide which services to migrate to the cloud, the choice of deployment model, and the rate of migration. He said they need to decide on data ownership, interoperability and infrastructure availability.

Sumner gave examples of governments' cloud strategies including the US, Singapore, Japan, India and the UK. He said the top challenges are security, legacy applications, cultural resistance in IT, and evolving standards, while alleviations are quality SLAs, the prioritisation of high value services, and sharing information on successful implementations.

In terms of practical progress, Sumner said that we are at an early stage. "There's lots of strategy but it's a work in progress," he said. "Governments are approaching cloud as a way of making savings and they could make up to 20-25%".

Asked if we could see a global e-government cloud, Sumner said this was "unlikely".

Ian Keene - telecoms and networking in Asia-Pacific

Looking at the big picture, Gartner VP Ian Keene said that governments believe that providing broadband and comms will spur economic growth, while service providers see broadband access as revenue opportunity. The main barrier, said Keene, is sufficient investment.

Keene then talked about specific markets in Asia-Pacific. Australia and China are huge markets, along with Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong, where broadband reached has saturation. He contrasted these with developing opportunities in Thailand, and India. Unlike Europe, where copper-based DSL holds sway and is offering ever-greater speeds, he said that for broadband, "it's a fibre world in Asia-Pacific, especially now that the region is aligned with the rest of the world and uses GPON optical technology.

Regulations are holding back new technologies by increasing risk, said Keene. "This means you need virtual local loop unbundling -- that's unbundling the bitstream not the physical infrastructure," he said.

Again contrasting APAC with Europe, Keene said Asia was slow to adopt LTE due to problems of spectrum release and licensing slowness. He noted though that numbers of cellular users in Asia are growing rapidly, while in Europe bandwidth growth not user growth is the pattern.