BrandPost: Hairpinning: The Dirty Little Secret of Most Cloud Security Vendors
In more than one conversation with large enterprise clients, we’ve heard the networking and infrastructure leaders responsible for managing the organization’s global WAN jokingly refer to themselves as the “Chief Hairpinning Officer” or CHO. At first blush, this provides a laugh. But there’s more than a bit of truth to this statement when you consider how much of networking professionals’ time, energy, and budget has traditionally been spent managing complex network routing decisions.
These decisions were key to stitching together different corporate sites and branches to the data center, while at the same time having to work with multiple internet service providers to ensure fast, reliable access for their users and a responsive application experience. Where this has gotten tricky over the last few years is aligning these network objectives with the growing security requirements facing enterprises. The problem has only worsened with the migration of applications and data to the cloud and SaaS, increasingly complex attacks, combined with the more recent explosion in remote work.