“Where’s your app? Where’s your data?”
Lightguard
For a long time, if you needed to know where your applications or data were, the answer was clear: it was always either on-premises or in a branch. Universally, almost regardless of organization size, infrastructures were contained, and visible within a defined boundary—you have a data center, a network, a branch, a user. Even if you had a few users connecting by VPN while traveling or working from home on occasion, it didn’t really impact network performance or introduce undue risks. Life was pretty good.
Then the cloud happened, and the answer to “Where’s your app? Where’s your data?” became a bit hazier than it had been. An application might still be in the data center. But sometimes it was in the cloud. Sometimes it was software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). But today’s mystery didn’t get scary for networking teams until about a year ago.