In addition to our general costs going down, the cost security infrastructure in the cloud has gone down for us. We are starting the process of inspecting traffic in the cloud in areas that we weren't able to look at before with our prior vendors. This is something we typically refer to as east-west traffic. One of the challenges we have had with other vendors in the cloud is, because of the infrastructure, we were dependent and reliant on the infrastructure that the cloud vendors gave us. We couldn't insert a piece of hardware into the environment. This means that our security layer was going to be applied with the same resources that other instances and servers were running on. We got into a situation where having a system in the cloud, an instance would generate, for example 10GBs of traffic. With our existing vendor set to apply a security policy east-west, we would need to inspect 10GBs of traffic. Unfortunately, even with their highest-end systems, legacy vendors struggle with inspecting traffic at or near this level of traffic. What we ended up doing, if we wanted to inspect traffic east-west, was to add layers of firewalls. In a traditional data center, you might have a pair of firewalls for thousands of hosts, but in the cloud, if you are interested in doing an east-west traffic inspection, that ratio of instances to software-based firewalls is much different. You might need to put down a firewall for every five or six systems, which really doesn't scale. There is no way to do it, not from a cost, licensing, or management perspective. It doesn't make sense to do it this way. This is one of the challenges in applying the older methodology of the legacy firewall technology in the cloud. You can do it, but it doesn't make any sense. Enter this concept of microservices, protecting only what you need to, so we don't need to absolutely inspect everything going east-west. However, we still need to do it and microservices instrumentation allows us to insert it where we need it the most, so protecting the valuable resources in the cloud and giving us the reach and extension to do the inspection east-west is something we want to do, but only where we absolutely need it. This is something which ShieldX gets that our other vendors don't. This is an area that we are exploring right now and hope to see finalized soon.
