CMC Networks

Latency vs Security: CMC Networks’ Gerrit Venter on the Benefits and Drawbacks of Encryption

30 January 2023

The Fast Mode spoke to Gerrit Venter, Head of Product at CMC Networks on new encryption technologies and their impact on today's networks. Gerrit joins us in a series of discussions with leading vendors in the traffic management, service assurance, traffic monitoring, analytics, policy control and network security space, assessing various attributes of encryption, its benefits as well as the challenges it poses, specifically loss of visibility that makes networking increasingly complex.

Tara: How important is encryption for today’s applications?

Gerrit: A vast majority of applications have shifted to the cloud, adopting a SaaS delivery model instead of the traditional on-premises model of the past. Having applications available in the cloud and potentially publicly accessible poses a huge threat to the integrity and safety of the data that these applications generate. Encryption plays a fundamental role in ensuring the integrity of modern-day cloud applications. Using encryption, application data can be secured in-transit and also at-rest protecting confidential data from being accessed, modified or used in any form. In addition, encryption also provides a mechanism to meet global or regional data privacy requirements for data anonymization strengthening enterprises overall governance postures. In summary, encryption is of critical importance to modern applications, especially when delivered through a cloud service, in an era where cyberthreats are more prevalent and security requirements have been much more stringent.

Tara: How has encryption impacted network and traffic visibility?

Gerrit: The impact of encryption, especially newer encryption protocols like TLS 1.3 and QUIC, from a network perspective can be seen in increased latency for network traffic due to the inherit overhead encryption places on network equipment. Traffic needs to be passed through networking appliances purpose-built to ensure encryption is performed and traffic is decrypted at its destination. This process can have a negative impact on the perception of the network particularly when these appliances are in data centers or location quite far removed from the traffic origin or end destination. The result could be seen in slower application or data processing times or performance degradation from an end-user perspective. Referring to the impact on network visibility, encryption can have a positive or negative impact depending on the perspective of the user. On one hand, a security specialist sees the positive impact of encryption in the form of securely sending confidential data across networks but on the other hand encryption prevents security specialists and network engineers to identify network traffic (malicious or not) which negatively impacts their ability to secure their networks and data.