Attendees at AWS re:Inforce in Boston were sophisticated and laser-focused on security.
During the conference, Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney sat down with TheCUBE’s host, Dave Vellante. Mullaney highlighted that those in attendance were not asking about or just thinking about moving to the cloud; rather, they are in full-on deployment mode and looking to secure their cloud(s). He drove home the fact that network security belongs in the network and should be integrated into the network’s fabric, not added on. See the full interview here.
The visitor sentiment at re:Inforce was that security is getting far more complicated—especially as cloud and multi-cloud adoption has expanded exponentially, which is unsurprising. There was also talk about a looming recession in the technology industry as companies brace for the worst. When asked by reporters and Vallante about the potential impact of a recession on Aviatrix, Mullaney smiled and said that Aviatrix and the likes of Snowflake are needed even more during a recession, especially given that more enterprises will move to the cloud.
For those still on-prem, gear and chips are far harder to obtain given the ongoing supply chain issues, and those moving to the cloud are experiencing firsthand the global talent gap and shortage of experienced networking engineers and architects and security teams. According to Mullaney, these talent troubles are only going to worsen, but Aviatrix helps bridge that gap through its platform and Advanced Cloud Services.
This week, Enterprise Editor Tom Kravitz at Protocol said, “Cloud tech is not nearly as rattled by a downturn as other tech sectors. Even as the U.S. is potentially staring down a recession, enterprise spending is going to remain stable. That is because businesses are in the middle of a ‘generational shift from old data centers to cloud services’… While older businesses are upgrading to stay afloat, new ones keep popping up and growing — and lots of them are flocking to the cloud.”
Isabelle Bousquette at The Wall Street Journal spoke with several CIOs, one expressing “the need to save results in increased focus on optimization, simplification and automation. Demands on technology teams may increase during this time.”
Acceleration Economy’s John Evans also pointed out Oracle’s Larry Ellison’s declaration that he is onboard with multi-cloud, echoing another conversation between Ellison and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about how the customer benefits from their multi-cloud breakthrough. In other words, the stars are aligning.
The key takeaway from the conference is that enterprises are indeed moving to the cloud and multi-cloud at record pace, which comes with mega complexities and far more security vulnerabilities with expansive networks. That is why cloud infrastructure is becoming the go-to solution for organizations. Decision makers may plan to focus on a single cloud platform, but they often need to support other cloud platforms due to acquisitions, client requirements, or application developer preferences. Each cloud service provider comes with its own processes, native constructs, and tools that can slow cloud network operations.
As Bryan Ashley, Aviatrix’s VP of Solutions Management and Marketing pointed out last fall, “You’ll only be in a single cloud… right up until you’re not.”
AWS re:Inforce Notables from the Aviatrix Crew on the Ground:
VP of Strategic Customer and Analyst Relations Rod Stuhlmuller said, “As re: Inforce is AWS’s security focused event, most people I engaged with were on enterprise cloud security teams. Aviatrix’s ability to embed security into the cloud network and distribute the functions across our entire data plane resonated well. They quickly understood how this cloud era approach would dramatically reduce business risk over traditional, single point of inspection designs. Most viewed Aviatrix as a logical complement to their current security investments in the short term, with a clear ability to modernize their architecture going forward.”
Aviatrix’s brand builder and Chief Marketing Officer Mike Welts roamed the event’s floor connecting with attendees, vendors, and customers, and concluded that “companies now expect security to be embedded into the network fabric and not bolted on—security should never be an afterthought in the cloud generation.”
One of Aviatrix’s recently hired talents, Evgeny Vaganov, VP of Solutions Architecture, APAC, said, “Enterprises of all sizes are using the cloud and many are already running their most critical workloads in one or multiple clouds. Cloud users attend conferences like re:Inforce to learn from their peers and industry experts on how to keep the cloud secure. Many are facing challenges keeping their sprawling, distributed cloud networks protected and are asking for a single pane of glass for greater visibility.”
“Aviatrix is uniquely positioned since it is in the network traffic path, and it sees all traffic flows,” continued Vaganov. “It does not require agents and runs exclusively within a customer’s cloud account. It also enforces security policy consistently across all clouds through inbuilt stateful firewall and FQDN filtering. These capabilities resonated with chief information security officers and security professions I spoke with at the conference, and many have asked for a follow up session as they want to try Aviatrix in their own environments.”
I’d like to give a sincere shout out to Deb Farmanian and Stephany Baker for managing such a successful conference presence and all the Aviatrix crew who were there to support the mission—from the Aviatrix folks mentioned above to Prateek Goel, Nauman Mustafa, Carter Duval, David Ouart, Jamie Pope, Emanuel Sifuentes, Jason Gervickas, Karthik Balachandran, Kathleen Harrigan, Matthew Demetros, Molly White, Ricardo Trentin, Kate McAvey, and our CISO Jenn Reed.
Find out how enterprises are solving networking and security challenges across AWS as well as Azure, Google, and Oracle clouds. Schedule a demo here.
