Data is moving out of its old centralized data-center digs. It packs a lot of baggage, which is winding up in cloud computing environments and bundled as serviceable software applications. Many companies are left playing hide-and-seek with all their distributed data, and they find securing it particularly tricky. We asked one company with decades-old data plus a revolving door of fresh data how it manages the whole lot.

Hillenbrand Inc. is an industrial manufacturing and servicing company with multiple global brands. For 150 years, it has produced and serviced process equipment, industrial pumps, heavy machinery, etc. It has amassed a ton of data, which it wants to refine into insights for better service, customer relations, and more. Further, its mergers-and-acquisitions strategy is quite robust and keeps injecting new data from new companies in the mix. Suffice to say, it finds managing and securing all of its data challenging.

“Those [traditional IT] boundaries are getting shattered,” said Suresh Manchella (pictured), director of global infrastructure at Hillenbrand Inc. “Information is everywhere. It’s no longer within those four boundaries.”

This is spurring a particularly dramatic overhaul of security, which now must be distributed as well. (Read: Firewalls don’t cut it.)

Manchella spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Open Systems “The Future Is Crystal Clear With Security and SD-WAN” event in Las Vegas. They discussed where software-defined networking fits into distributed data and IT systems. (* Disclosure below.)

Endpoints new security endgame

In the hybrid and multicloud world, data is often located in territories outside of the on-premises data center, according to Manchella. “For the most part, you don’t have access to those back-end systems, so how do you protect them?” he asked. “Rather than focusing on the central systems, we have to focus on the endpoints at this point.”

Using the example of company acquisitions, Manchella illustrated how SD-WAN can integrate and protect data from new or far-flung sources.

“When we acquire a company and try to integrate these things, we cannot wait several months for an [multiprotocol label switching] provider to drop a circuit and get them in and things of that nature,” he said.

The company uses Open Systems AG’s SD-WAN with integrated security to connect all of its data.

“You only need an internet connection, and they do all the magic behind the scenes and put it all together,” Manchella concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Open Systems “The Future Is Crystal Clear With Security and SD-WAN” event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Open Systems “The Future Is Crystal Clear With Security and SD-WAN” event. Neither Open Systems AG, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE