By Michelle McLean
Yankee Group recently published a report entitled “The Era of the Virtualized Organization Demands Context-aware LANs.” ConSentry commissioned the report after extensive discussions with customers about how their businesses have been changing and the ways in which today’s static LANs have made it difficult for them to keep up with those changes.
What does Yankee mean by the virtualized organization? The term refers to the constant coming and going of different “workers” – including employees, guests, contractors, partners, even competitors – as well as those workers’ devices and applications. It also encompasses the idea of ad hoc groups, where people from different parts of the business, both inside and outside, come together to work on a given project (M&A activity, for example, or a CRM customization).
The Yankee report contends that given the rise of the virtualized organization, IT needs a more dynamic and knowledgeable infrastructure to accurately assign user access rights on the LAN. The report argues that to regain control, IT needs context in the LAN – deep knowledge of the user, role, device, application at Layer 7, destination, and environmental factors such as location and time of day. Based on this richer set of information, the LAN becomes an orchestrator – delivering the right services to the right people at the right time. And IT has the info needed to better manage the interactions amongst users, applications, and devices.
Essentially, with context-driven switching, policy becomes the new forwarding table.
You can read the full report on the ConSentry site, and hear Yankee Analyst Zeus Kerravala discuss what organizations require to solve this problem.
Clearly the LAN edge isn’t the only place to need context – the data center and the LAN/WAN boundary are two other places that would benefit greatly from a richer understanding of the users, applications, and devices traversing them.
Where else do you think context matters? And what other attributes will it encompass? I look forward to reading your comments.
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