Day of reckoning for startups, consolidation of network security appliances

VCs get out of the security game? "We're going to see some shakeups. It might very well be the year that a lot of venture capital firms try to recoup some of their investments," Kindervag said. "So you'll see a lot of VC-backed companies merging together or being bought by larger companies. I think a lot of [them] have run out of cash, and there's not much of an appetite to pour more money into some of these things."


Super network security devices: Kindervag said 2010 could bring a new generation of network security appliances that do -- well -- just about everything. "If there is any hot technology for next year, it will probably be security devices that are uber-intelligent and extremely fast – a cross between unified threat management and what some people are calling next-generation firewall architectures. These will be devices where a tremendous amount of intelligence is applied to the packet, all the way up to Layer 7, in near real time at any speed, whether it is a 10 Gb core or better. That's where everything is moving to – this consolidation of multiple technologies which will just be features on more robust security gateways. So you can turn on the firewall feature, you can turn on the IPS feature. They will all be embedded into this codebase and they will all be able to function within a single clock cycle.

VoIP and unified communications security awareness: Enterprises will play catch up with securing newly installed IP telephony and collaboration technologies that were deployed without a proper network security vetting, Kindervag said. "There's all this new stuff and we haven't implemented it securely. We've implemented it in an ad hoc way, and we need to secure it. This is something that hasn't happened before," he said. "It used to be you had to go through a long process to determine whether something is secure and then implement it. Now we're looking at whether it's secure long after it's been in general usage. Everything changed so quickly, with the rise of social networking and Web 2.0 that the demand from the user side was so great and it couldn't be controlled by a small group of 'paranoid' security types."