VMware predicts the end of the corporate LAN

VMware is predicting the death of the corporate LAN. The company's UK chief cloud technologist, Joe Baguley, said that organisations are keen to move to an environment where apps are delivered to the workforce straight from a virtualised, secure datacentre via the public internet.

Baguley explained at a roundtable discussion at VMware's plush Bankside offices that this would ultimately be more secure than traditional IT environments, where security is treated as an add-on rather than built in from the start.

"We've built applications and infrastructure without thinking about security first," he said. "What we're seeing is a desire to say: 'Let's shrink everything to be within the datacentre and then deliver everything out of it to the internet, so there is no concept of the corporate LAN anymore. There's just the internet.'"

The road to this kind of infrastructure is likely to be a long one for IT departments, so it will need to be achieved in steps. The biggest challenge at present is desktop applications, which is why many companies use desktop virtualisation and thin client architectures.

However, the ultimate goal is a set-up where apps are hosted securely in the public cloud and delivered to a firm's staff, removing the need to run a datacentre.

Of course, VMware has products that help companies to migrate to this new way of delivering and managing applications, most notably with Horizon App Manager which provides the "aggregation point" where customers can consume all apps from a single portal in a fully compliant way.

Security in this new virtualised world is reduced to the level of each individual service, explained Baguley, because "the smaller the thing is, the easier it is to secure".

Trend Micro's EMEA chief technology officer, Andy Dancer, made the valid point that many organisations erroneously try to treat virtual environments as they would traditional IT security.

Putting anti-virus agents on every virtual machine, of course, will cause a storm of problems as the resource-hungry security tools grind systems to a halt.

Security needs to be complementary and virtually aware, behaving more like a human immune system than a protective bubble, according to Baguley.

Vertical specific cloud providers are already cropping up, such as NYSE Euronext, with strict service level agreements and more guarantees on uptime and security than more general cloud vendors.

How quickly this will accelerate the path to the future envisaged by Baguley and VMware remains to be seen. Early adopters, yes, but the vast majority are probably years off considering such a move.   

30 Sep 2011