In this blog post, which is the second of a three-part series, we are going to share how perimeter thinking falls short in a high-speed, high-density world. In the first post in the series, we explored the idea of rethinking the relationship between security and performance .  Securing the data center used to be simple, at least on paper: Build a strong perimeter, deploy firewalls at the north-south boundary, and control what enters and exits the network. That model worked when applications were monolithic, data stayed in one place, and artificial intelligence (AI) was a future ambition rather than an infrastructure reality. But those days are over. Today, AI-powered data centers, high-performance machine learning workloads, and cloud native architectures generate more internal traffic than ever before. More than 76% of data center traffic now flows east to west , moving between GPUs, endpoints, APIs, datasets, and internal services. It no longer crosses the perimeter.…