BrandPost: Beyond the Firewall - Different Rules for East-West Traffic
Network firewalls were created to block unauthorized content and code from the network while ensuring the unimpeded flow of data packets vital to the operations of the enterprise. But they were designed to intercept external incursion, not prevent security issues inside the network.
“As server virtualization has increased in popularity, the amount of traffic moving laterally across the data center (East-West) has dwarfed traditional client-server traffic, which moves in and out (North-South),” industry analyst Zeus Kerravala writes in Network World. “This is playing havoc with data center managers as they attempt to meet the demands of this era of IT.”