Broadcom to Migrate Security Platforms to Google Cloud
Broadcom Inc. and Google announced today an alliance under which the portfolio of security offerings that Broadcom gained with the acquisition of the enterprise division of Symantec have been migrated to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Tom Krause, president of the Broadcom Software Group, said the goal is to migrate the rest of the Broadcom security offerings to GCP in place of the data centers on which Symantec originally hosted its cloud-based services.
The first two offerings migrated to the cloud are Symantec Web Security Service (WSS) and Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). As part of that effort, Broadcom will employ GCP services such as Cloud SQL, Dataproc and Bigtable to surface advanced analytics capabilities to cybersecurity teams.
Debanja Saha, vice president and general manager for data analytics for Google, said in the longer term, GCP also provides the level of scale that will be required to infuse additional artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, based on machine learning algorithms, into the Broadcom portfolio.
Finally, Broadcom will also be in a better position to take advantage of cloud-native platforms, such as Kubernetes, to enable its offerings to more easily scale up and down as required.
Broadcom acquired the enterprise division of Symantec at the end of 2019 to drive what Krause said is a $20 billion global market opportunity. As security platforms shifted to the cloud to enable easier scalability, it became apparent Broadcom would need a platform that would scale in a way that would simplify providing resilient cloud security services anywhere in the world and that could meet performance requirements in any geography, noted Krause.
This alliance with Google is an extension of an existing relationship between the two companies that revolves around the semiconductor research Broadcom conducts using GCP. Right now, this extension of that alliance is focused on the Broadcom security portfolio, but as opportunities present themselves, it might also be extended to the IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps tools Broadcom gained when it acquired CA Technologies, noted Krause.
As the level of scale required to process and analyze security data becomes more apparent it’s now only a matter of time before most security platforms are hosted on public clouds. The cost of building data centers to host security software around the world is simply cost-prohibitive.
At the same time, the volume of attacks continues to rise. Cloud platforms provide the compute power required to analyze those attacks in real-time.
It’s not clear to what degree a security vendor’s underlying cloud platform might influence a customer’s decision to select one cloud security service over another. There are organizations that want as much of their data on a single cloud as possible to drive efficiencies. There are others that won’t do business with a cloud service provider they may directly compete with, for example, in the retail sector.
Regardless of preference, the only way security vendors will be able to meet the challenges ahead is if massive volumes of security data finds its way to cloud platforms sooner rather than later.
