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6 Data Center & Hybrid Cloud Security For Dummies, Palo Alto Networks Special Edition These materials are © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Recognizing Security Challenges in the Data Center and Hybrid Cloud The data center is rapidly evolving from a traditional, closed envi- ronment with static, hardware-based computing resources to one in which there is a mix of traditional and cloud computing tech- nologies (see Figure 1-1). Three distinct trends and challenges are emerging in the modern data center (see Figure 1-2): » New data center technologies: Big data analytics and virtualized applications are producing an explosion of data within the data center. To accommodate this transformation, enterprises are adopting technologies including virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), and hyperconverged infrastructures, that allow for the extension of new and existing applications into hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. The elastic nature of these workloads requires the network to scale up and out on demand, but this makes it difficult for data center teams to enforce security as workloads move across data centers and clouds. Data center teams can't see where the workloads are, who is using them, or where those users are connecting from. These teams are also challenged to enforce proper access controls and implement a Zero Trust architecture. Fundamentally, security must be consistently enforced regardless of workload dynamics. FIGURE 1-1: Data centers are evolving to include a mix of hardware and cloud computing technologies.