The idea of a single monolithic firewall to provide protection from cyber threats is becoming a bit quaint. The data center is breaking up and moving to multiple environments — this is true for most companies moving to the cloud and doubly true for those involved in the Internet of Things (IoT). This is putting demands on these data outposts to do more and raising uncomfortable questions about how they will be secured.

Rich Miller, founder and editor at Data Center Frontier, LLC, said that the data center, in the strictest sense of the term, is over. “What we’re seeing now first with edge computing, which is a phenomenon where content is trying to go everywhere — and to make the network be able to handle it — we’ve started to move content to smaller data centers in edge markets, the kind of places that may not have supported a lot of data centers in the past,” he said.

Outsourcing to the edge

Miller told John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris) of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Riverbed Disrupt event that as the data center spreads out to the edge, its workloads must migrate with it.

“These smaller data centers will have to have enough sort of compute power to do some processing, do an initial round of analytics, and then send a smaller batch of data to the center,” he said.

Quantum wave coming — head for high ground

Jim Pflaging, principal at The Chertoff Group, also took part in the interview, and he spoke about the security challenges posed by all of this data in transit, particularly the threat to encryption posed by quantum computing. He said that consumer quantum computing could be here in as little as 10 years, and it has the power to break through crypto-modules.

“If the things that we use to generate trust to pass data securely can be cracked, that has a tremendous impact on IoT,” he said. While Pflaging is an advocate of encryption and said it is here to stay, he thinks companies need to start thinking about additional security measures before the quantum wave hits.

“Security’s not like peanut butter — you can’t apply it equally across the board. You really have to have a good sense of what’s the most important, then think about where and how that data should move and secure it appropriately, put the right policies in place,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of The IO Conversation – The Data Center as a Platform event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE