Senior Executive Advisor with more than 30 years of technology and cybersecurity experience.
With cyber threats on the rise, the need for 24x7 security monitoring is becoming increasingly important. However, for an individual company or agency, accomplishing this level of security on their own requires a multi-million dollar investment in manpower, equipment, and management consoles. Between monitoring the network environment, aggregating and storing log files, and managing security policies, building and maintaining a distributed security infrastructure necessary to adequately protect customer and corporate data is both time-consuming and cost-prohibitive. When forced to weigh the costs of keeping these functions internal against shrinking IT budgets, more and more companies and agencies are choosing to outsource their security management because it’s more cost-effective and, in many cases, a better operation than they could assemble themselves.
Virtualization, as a key component to cloud computing and managed services, has had a tremendous impact on IT and data center operations. The ability to tear down and stand up services rapidly improves corporate flexibility and serves as a force multiplier to easily generate more services as the demand arises. However, this infrastructure also presents unique security challenges, especially if the entire network – including routing, switching, and security devices – isn’t virtualized or virtualization aware. For instance, because multiple services are hosted on singe servers, some data or services that should remain separated may end up co-mingled to maximize available server space. In this case, security devices – which are commonly configured based on physical locations – may not provide sufficient levels of security for all the services hosted on a single server. Read more
Cloud computing, virtualization, and managed services can certainly help companies achieve their security goals, but challenges continue to multiply. The rapid adoption rate of new technology, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, into the enterprise adds more access points and creates more risk. Allowing these devices to access the enterprise network causes IT departments to compromise some of their security policies, creating vulnerabilities along the way. And with ever-improving attack methods, it’s harder to protect data through traditional perimeter defenses. In the next five to ten years, companies need to work together and develop innovative ways of protecting data using strong encryption, multi-factor authentication, and other methods to get a step ahead of cyber criminals.
