Revamp your network security - now

Did you like to blow things up when you were little? Come on, be honest. I'll come clean. More than a few mailboxes fell under the onslaught of my juvenile pyromania. Being an adult means wanton destruction is frowned upon. But maybe there is something we can do to regain the thrill.

Try this on for size: You should blow up your network. That's right - over the next 18 months you'll be overhauling your campus network. It's time. You know you are tired of those old Layer 3 switches. Those are so five years ago. Aren't those boxes depreciated yet? Get the finance guys on the horn.

The business has changed. The insider threat is real. Folks connect to your network from conference rooms and over VPNs from unsafe environments. You can't stick your head in the sand anymore. Compliance has teeth and you need to segment networks and protect sensitive data. Acknowledging this is a huge change for me, since I used to laugh when told that people needed to secure internal networks.

I remember talking years ago to companies that were pitching that customers needed to extend the protection deeper into the network. I laughed. The moat is deep and wide. The bad guys cannot get in. Well, now the bad guys are us and they may already be on the network. We need to make the network much less hospitable to them.