My former employer took down my page on this topic. Fortunately, I had it backed up. So here is the original Ultra Secure Network article.
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My former employer took down my page on this topic. Fortunately, I had it backed up. So here is the original Ultra Secure Network article.
PCI Guru 
I really like the image “Ultra-Secure” Web-based Network Architecture, and would like to use it (or a close facsimile, perhaps with some updates) in a presentation. Would that be alright, and if so, how would you prefer to be credited?
You are welcome to use it. Credit it as from Jeff Hall, aka PCI Guru.
I keep meaning to update this, but just have not found the time.
Like all your posts, this is excellent reading. Middle of writing a RoC and Googling for a particular FAQ I couldn’t recall the number of I came across this and read it. Still great work. As a QSA doing 10 or more RoC a year, I find your writings awesome.
John T
Thank you. I really appreciate the kind words.
With the onset of virtual switching and SDN how does the PCI Council adopt this in a secure acceptable deployment? There are numerous PCI and PCI-DSS certified cloud providers stating they are compliant in a IaaS design or full on VDC. Thoughts?
A very good question. However I would argue that the controls required by the PCI DSS and other PCI standards transfer over to software defined networks (SDN) and virtualized networks. This is no different with other virtual environments for servers and storage.
Where I have encountered problems is in how those controls are implemented and managed. Most providers and their customers run into trouble because too many people/processes have access and can make changes that could affect security. That needs to be locked down which can result in issues with provisioning and operations. But that is the whole point of those controls is to lock things down so that changes are NOT easily made without necessary consideration and approvals.
I enjoyed looking at this.
I saw something similar but it actually went a little further in regards to using different firewall vendors for each layer, IPS/IDS technology spanned with the firewalls (different IPS/IDS technology at each level), segregation by OS to some extent and the use of a backup network as well to prevent the backup traffic from clogging the production or management network.
It is now seven years old. Someday when I have time, I’ll update this to something more current.
I would like to see that 🙂