Security: now and always

Vishak Raman, Country Manager, Fortinet India, on emerging trends with regard to the security landscape of an enterprise.

Vishak Raman

Raman presented his views on security in today’s context. “Your business is changing,” he said.

He talked about the various IT infrastructure challenges in the Indian context such as security threats & network management, application performance management, LAN / WAN links optimisation, hardware / server maintenance & management, IT policies, processes and people management.

With regard to enterprise infrastructure security concerns, he said, “The common questions in the minds of Indian CIOs pertain to the current level of security, the need for a single window or dashboard, from where you can find out about an attacker, his motive and whether he succeeded or not.” Other concerns that Raman pointed out were whether new threats would call for new platforms and the outsource vs. in-source decision.

He highlighted several performance issues with respect to security that may concern CIOs. For instance, most CIOs are skeptical as to how network performance will be affected if they turn on security functions. “Questions like does it slow down our WAN and what is the user experience on applications, mail, Web and what is the uptime guarantee concern every CIO,” he pointed out.

Raman believes that security has evolved to the extent that it confers a competitive advantage. He made an observation that security is imperative and that it provides an edge in industries such as IT and ITeS, however, the question was whether it mattered in other sectors.

If the topic of competitive advantage has been spoken about, one cannot disregard issues such as mobile workforce, new business tools, and compliance requirements. Raman felt that e-mail, Web, and VoIP are mission-critical applications. Speaking on the evolution of the applications, Raman gave examples of IM with VoIP, e-mail & Web plug-in, new P2P applications and patches for existing applications.

The obvious effect of business changes is the evolving threat landscape. “The motive of the attacks have changed,” he said. Raman opined that the intent of the attacker was to gain fame although the motivation was criminal. “Cyber crime economics are too compelling to subside,” he said. It is not hard to understand that malicious threats will lead to data losses, identify theft, corporate espionage, business downtime, bad publicity and regulatory fines.

Another interesting point made was about challenges such as performance and outbreak containment faced by large enterprises during core deployment.