FEATURE: CYBERSECURITY
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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION HAS
RESULTED IN DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS
WITH GEOGRAPHICALLY DISPERSED
EMPLOYEES, USING MANY DIFFERENT
DEVICES WITH PRETTY WELL
UNIVERSAL MOBILITY.
can easily lose control. Our research shows
73% of IT staff and 64% of business users
agree this is making it more difficult to keep
the company secure from cyber attacks,
with 53% believing it’s caused a clear lack
of ownership and responsibility for IT and
49% that it is resulting in the purchasing of
non-secure solutions.
The movement of traditional silos between
IT and the business is shifting roles
and responsibilities, but this cannot be
allowed to result in a lack of clarity over
who ‘owns’ security and compliance.
IT must be empowered to manage this
operational ownership while also providing
the flexibility for other lines of business
to drive innovation. This requires a single,
unified platform wherein businesses can run,
manage, connect and secure applications,
across devices – and clouds – and from
which IT can manage it all with a single view.
What IT is today, won’t be what
IT looks like tomorrow
The way we develop, manage and consume
IT is constantly changing. So how do you
know what this landscape will look like
tomorrow, let alone secure it?
Gone are the days of predictability; agility,
flexibility and scalability are required to
be able to manage and secure IT within
a modern organisation. If companies
cannot implement security at the speed
of the business then security becomes
an inhibitor for progress and innovation,
rather than an enabler.
This ‘future-proofing’ of IT security requires
another shift in our thinking. Traditionally,
most security is about searching for
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INTELLIGENTCIO
‘bad’: monitoring the entire infrastructure
continuously for malware, and for breaches
in general. The problem with this approach
suspension, blocking, quarantining of the
virtual machine or more.
This contextual intelligence and automation
removes the guesswork involved in
determining which changes are legitimate
and which are real threats; it’s the only
way security can keep pace with the rest
of the business and implement a ‘security-
everywhere’ strategy.
Looking ahead
These observations and developments
all point towards one thing: the need to
establish a common source of truth between
a security solution and the environment that
needs protection. The environment will keep
IF EXTERNAL COMPANY PERIMETERS
HAVE ALL BUT DISSOLVED, INTERNAL
PERIMETERS ARE ALSO CHANGING
WITH REGARDS TO THE OWNERSHIP OF
IT AND SECURITY.
is that it relies on knowing what ‘bad’
looks like; in a world where most emerging
threats are so-called ‘zero-day’ attacks that
have never been seen before, a decreasing
level of effectiveness should hardly come as
a surprise.
The changing nature of the threat landscape,
combined with the accelerating pace and
complexity of business clearly demands
another solution; less trying to chase the
unknown ‘bad’, and more ensuring that only
the known ‘good’ is executed.
Our brand new VMware AppDefense
technology, for example, captures what
the desired ‘good’ state of an application
looks like. Once this is known, any deviation
from ‘good’ can be flagged and a defined
action taken. AppDefense carries out
this monitoring in continuous real time,
immediately detecting when anything
deviates from ‘good’ – before triggering
an automated response, whether that be
evolving; innovation and transformation
are only going to accelerate and become
even more radical. But with this ‘truth’
– stemming from greater visibility and
an increased understanding of context
– businesses will be better able to make
sense of their increasingly fragmented and
complex IT footprints to offer protection at
the speed that’s required; to secure, enable
and innovate, in order to remain competitive
and to drive ever-improving performance. n
THE WAY WE
DEVELOP, MANAGE
AND CONSUME IT
IS CONSTANTLY
CHANGING.
www.intelligentcio.com