FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
door and, in the modern world, CCTV
and firewalls. Within today’s world of
business, however, digital transformation
has resulted in dynamic environments with
geographically dispersed employees, using network security cannot be expected
to protect the ever-shifting footprint of
applications and users when you can’t
define where the ‘perimeter’ is, or even if
there is one at all.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION HAS
RESULTED IN DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS
WITH GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED
EMPLOYEES, USING MANY DIFFERENT
DEVICES WITH PRETTY WELL
UNIVERSAL MOBILITY.
many different devices with pretty well
universal mobility. In this context, we need
to ask what is the IT equivalent of the moat?
What should an organisation actually be
trying to protect in this brave new world?
The traditional approach to security needs
be turned ‘inside out’. Perimeter-centric
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INTELLIGENTCIO
We need to overhaul the basic concept of
IT security, inserting it as an intrinsic quality
throughout the infrastructure, rather than
only at its edge. Businesses can achieve this
by leveraging common software layers such
as the hypervisor for application infrastructure
and an enterprise mobility management
platform for endpoints and user identity.
Security inserted here, by definition, touches
all elements of the – apps, data, users,
devices, storage, the network – delivering
protection everywhere, maximising visibility
and context of the interaction between users
and applications, and better aligning security
controls and policies to the applications
they are protecting. This is where the
vulnerabilities now lie, and in the modern
world of mobile, distributed IT, this is what
needs safeguarding.
There is a greater risk of
fragmented IT ownership than
ever before
If external company perimeters have all
but dissolved, internal perimeters are also
changing with regards to the ownership of
IT and security. Cloud computing is giving
users across the business direct, rapid access
to data, applications and services, when they
want it, regardless of where they are and
what devices they’re using.
However, as lines of business and employees
take increasing ownership of the technology
they use, it’s becoming increasingly
difficult to get any real visibility of IT within
organisations, meaning that businesses
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