Brief

IDC calls for proactive security policy

The IDC India Security and Continuity Conference 2006 underlined the importance of “dynamic resilience” as a proactive approach to business continuity. It addresses the need for a continuous operation of an enterprise’s critical business processes, in the context of a distributed environment.

Businesses are rapidly changing with growth and competition, pushing enterprises to make information available 24x7 and enable better and faster decision-making. Enterprises are networking with both their downstream and upstream partners in the ecosystem to streamline and optimise their value chain. The need for higher availability coupled with compliance to regulations will put Identity & Access Management (IAM) solutions in the mainstream in 2006.

The event highlighted the urgent need of Dynamic Resilience among the Indian organisations. It will provide Indian businesses long-term cost savings, increase competitive ability, help find the weakest link in the business, create compliance and regulatory adherence and provide shareholder confidence.

Praveen Sengar, Senior Analyst, IDC (India) speaking on the need for dynamic resilient security said, “Tomorrow’s infrastructure will become more complex, there will be increased diversity in infrastructure, businesses will have less response time, the network traffic profile will change and unexpected events will test your resilience.”

These factors would make enterprises design a centralised security policy, which takes into consideration the needs of employees and partners alike. This trend will increasingly set the boundaries that govern security management and administration policies in enterprises.

The key trends in the Indian security market are a convergence of network and desktop security coming closer, different unified threat management appliances, policy-based administration and single sign on coming into usage. The other aspects highlighted were the emergence of solutions approach or the service element becoming important thus giving rise to security consulting and the rise of end-to-end security services and managed security services (MSS). Enterprises are looking to outsource security management to third parties.

Among all these changes IDC predicts that future dynamics of the security market are smoothly moving towards Business Process Security and end-to-end security solutions.

Sengar also suggested key issues that must be considered while finalising the appropriate security solution in an organisation. He advises organisations to have proactive IT security. He points out, “Look at security from the total enterprise wide requirement. Stress on security education, awareness and communication. Take all exposed points into account—Internet, wireless and mobile access. Evaluate your risks, security audits and have a clearly defined security policy. Consider a managed security service provider in case you feel that it is difficult to manage internally.” He also pointed out that in case a single vendor is not able to provide the required security parameters, an organisation should look at the right mix between software and appliances or be open to be served by various vendors.

Security strategy needs to be dynamic and changing in order to respond to sophisticated threats. Dynamic Resilience is about proactively ensured security, business continuity, network availability, and application access. Today, customers are reaching pain thresholds on ineffective solutions and rising personnel costs and management complexity.

“Security is moving from ‘perimeter defence’ to a ‘business process centric’ approach. There will be further consolidation in the market offerings and end-to-end business process centric security solutions will emerge. Security is not an isolated department but a mindset and should cut across people, process and technology,” he adds.

— Priya Jain