As network engineers become accustomed to a flat layer 2 network and Spanning Tree protocol as discussed in Chapter 1, The Impact of Cloud on Networking, network security and approaches towards securing an enterprise network have become very mature and well understood by security teams over the years.
Most security engineers are well versed in the best practices that should be implemented when dealing with physical networks. A security team will normally look to implement a rigid set of security best practices on the network, which network teams must comply with, to pass necessary accreditations. But how applicable are these best practices when implementing software-defined networking?
It is fair to say that there is still a knowledge gap that exists regarding software-defined networking at the moment and there is a degree of fear and uncertainty of the unknown from security engineers and even some network engineers.
This chapter will hopefully...