Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 03 | Page 55

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Enterprise Security When your SSL decryption solution prevents security SSL is everywhere. Today, many of the most popular websites leverage encryption to keep data secure and private. On top of that, other applications such as email, instant messaging, and FTP use SSL or its successor TLS to encrypt traffic. Need proof that SSL is ubiquitous? According to Sandvine, two thirds of Internet traffic will be encrypted by 2016, writes Glen Ogden, Regional Sales Director, Middle East at A10 Networks. www.intelligentcio.com W hen organisations start encrypting application traffic, they often encounter obstacles such as performance degradation on their application servers. Encryption has other, more serious, ramifications; it makes network security tools blind to application traffic. Security solutions like next-generation firewalls, intrusion prevention, and advanced threat protection platforms cannot inspect packets and mitigate threats when traffic is encrypted. To solve this issue, organisations can deploy SSL inspection platforms to decrypt SSL traffic and forward it to third-party security devices for analysis. For outbound traffic, organisations own the end points but not the SSL certificates and keys. An SSL inspection platform can decrypt traffic when configured as a transparent forward proxy or an explicit proxy. Protecting corporate servers Decrypting inbound traffic destined to internal application servers is different INTELLIGENTCIO 55