Spiralling security solutions

It seems to me like there’s more and more regulatory pressure burgeoning everyday at the moment – and it’s a pressure cooker that is making companies increasingly vulnerable to the consequences of data breaches. The days of dealing with data breaches in-house are on the way out and the consequences of being caught trying to do this are potentially worse than simply confessing.

Securing data while it travels between applications, business partners, suppliers, customers and other members of an extended enterprise is crucial. As enterprise networks continue to become increasingly accessible, so do the risks that information will be intercepted or altered in transmission.

Was this an inevitability you may ask? Well, more technology, more data and more users equals more potential pitfalls and problems. An increasingly litigious society and wildly proliferating web-based corruption hasn’t helped either I guess. How many times have you been offered the chance to send 50,000 dollars to invest in an untapped goldmine in Sierra Leone this year?

Building secure networks with new levels of encryption, firewalls and biometric passwords has become an industry in itself. Just look at the NSA in the US or our own MI5 (hi guys – if your scanners picked that one up) as an example.

The future then, what’s next? Well many companies have a security policy and the more progressive among them also manage and maintain a vulnerability management programme. This is primarily to ensure that the organisation uses and regularly updates anti-virus software on all applications and secondly, that they develop and maintain secure systems and applications.