Security.  It’s an interesting topic when it comes to networking within Enterprise IT.  There are those that are truly focused on an end to end view of security or just freakishly enjoy security and then those that are usually okay with just implementing a perimeter FW and maybe an IDS/IPS.  So, when it comes to your “typical” Enterprise LAN, all hosts are inherently trusted so communication between clients and servers, clients and clients, and servers and servers, is unprotected.  I will say, in 2011, I've seen this starting to change and infrastructure security is becoming even more critical for the average “mid-market” customer for various reasons, but heavily attributed to the wide adoption smart phones, tablets, and the whole “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) mantra being driven by the consumer.

Anyway, what does this have to do with OpenFlow/SDN?  Nothing…yet, but the question that came to me while I was in a meeting with a NYC based financial firm last week was, “How will security be perceived with running a *real* virtualized network with control plane separation happening at a controller?” 

Before I go any further, here is some background…

For those that aren’t aware, I was proudly in a fraternity in college and our motto was simple, “Loved, Hated, but Never Ignored,” and we wore it proudly on our fraternity t-shirts.  The same motto seems to be true for Software Defined Networks in the industry at this moment.  There is a community of folks that see the potential, but not everyone is on board, not everyone thinks it’s for real, some call it hype, some call it a technology for Cloud Providers, and some think that it was built by the academic community and that’s where it will stay for the long term, but you know what, people keep talking about it, and that’s a great thing…because you don’t want to be ignored ;).  There have been many blogs, tweets, and announcements in this space with the most recent coming from Nicira.