Day 3/ Session

Certainty for Uncertain Times

Navin Mehra, National Head - Fortinet India, talked about security consolidation & virtualization

Mehra kicked off his presentation by saying that the pressure was on IT heads to derive more from less. There was greater focus on OPEX and enterprises faced the complexity and cost of managing multiple security solutions, increased pressure to improve security service while reducing TCO, they had limited datacenter real estate and manageability concerns rise as a result and, increasingly, environmental concerns were on the corporate agenda.

He listed the top concerns in the field of IT security starting with the dynamic threat landscape wherein the continued sophistication and prevalence of threats, required multiple layers of security to protect an organization from their depredations, regulatory compliance pressures (SOX, PCI, etc.) etc. The next concern area was that of business continuity where CIOs had to take cognizance of the impact of security breaches on business, offer higher performance to cope with the evolution of business applications, support distributed networks as well as mobile users. With regard to the IT budget, the IT head had to do more with less and within that lesser outlay manage the complexity and cost of managing multiple security solutions, face increased pressure to improve security service while reducing TCO etc. Another area was that of reducing the physical footprint of equipment. Datacenter space is at a premium and one has to worry about the environmental impact nowadays.

So how does one go about navigating the security landscape? Network security is one obvious resource in terms of Firewalls for shielding the organization from external threats, VPN for securing private traffic across public networks, IPS for monitoring and active protection from malicious traffic et al. Content security was another important aspect, he said, where you had Web filtering for protection from harmful Web sites and Web content; Anti-virus / Anti-malware for detecting and removing malicious application content; messaging security for detecting and stopping malicious email and its payload in its tracks… Then you had Application Security including Application Firewalls for protecting apps delivered as Web services, Application Control that had to be managed regardless of the protocol or port being used, Data Leak Prevention for preventing documents leaving the network without authorization, Database Security for protecting vital corporate data stored in databases from internal threats.

Next, Mehra addressed the point solution syndrome which he stated was difficult to manage, involved dealing with multiple management interfaces, the problem being made worse thanks to lack of integration between vendors, the inability to zero in on one single vendor when the time came to resolve issues, the fact that it was expensive to deploy and maintain, the complexity of dealing with multiple vendor contracts, support licensing etc. and datacenter resources had to be allocated (power, rack space, cooling).

Picking up on the point of lack of integration, he stressed that this tended to lead to reduced security. Then there were performance challenges because of the multiple inspection steps involved with data packets being examined by layer after layer of security software/hardware which tended to tax network performance while software-only solutions only made things worse.