Rational Survivability

Gives the enterprise people warm fuzzy feeling: "Hey, it's just like home!"

Had an interesting discussion about this the other day. It begain with the "dumb network" debate in which the network becomes a simple highspeed delivery mechanism and intellegence is pushed to the end node. Similar to a highway where the "road" is simple and has limited governance. Conversely, a car has the ability to choose where to go, how fast to go, airbags, anti-lock, etc. If that analogy doesn't work well, use your home with keyed doors, security system, thermostat, etc.

Anyway, as virtualization and cloud continues to grow, will the "intelligent" network be necessary? Even now, VMware is absorbing multiple network services (FW, VPN, NAT, etc.).

What if everything outside of the local system interface was considered hostel because only specific nodes were trusted, regardless of transport? I question how you can secure the network when the only constant is the node. So is the target to secure the transport, node, or data? Mix as you will, something gotta give…