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Top 5 Information security trends

Prosenjeet Banerjee highlights the top information security trends that organizations need to look out for this year

Information Security has always been amongst the top focus areas for every CIO across the world for decades. The challenge is to effectively monitor, detect, report and respond not only to new security threats and compliance but also to existing vulnerabilities in corporate IT systems and applications. With increasing number of concerns like fraud, hacking, compliance breaches etc coming into the light, information security has become a pressing concern for Chief Security Officers. As a recent Gartner report said, “Information security strategies are not just about technology; they must include processes and policies as critical components. Other important factors in relation to the budgets and resources invested include the tools and services selection, their integration within company infrastructure, usage and assessment for improvement.” In short the game called Information security is getting complex and multi-layered with each passing day!

In this article we will explore the latest trends in the security domain that will capture the attention amongst Indian enterprises in the coming year.

End Point Security

Fueled by continuous security threats and vulnerability to business operations, and potential penalties for non-compliance, organizations are confronted by a need to adopt right strategy and solutions to ensure a protected network. Enterprises will see a growing demand in adopting technologies that will not only secure their access level network but also thus ensure their compliance. Network Admission Control (NAC) is an End-Point Security is one such technology that restricts access to a corporate network based on identity or security posture. A number of large enterprises in India have sensed this critical requirement and working with service providers and principles to build up an enterprise wide end point solution and service framework.

Identity & access management

Identity and Access Management refers to technologies that enable organizations to establish, administer, control, restrict and audit user access to IT services & resources and business knowledge. The latest ITIL specifications visualize IAM as a key driver to align IT with business performance. Forrester estimates that IAM is ‘just beginning its trajectory towards broad adoption and deep penetration’, growing to a 12.3 billion dollar industry worldwide in about six years. More and more organizations in India from various industry verticals are now gearing up to embrace IAM. There has been an increasing trend in last two years, which would certainly gear up to higher pace in the coming years.

Adoption of managed security services

According to renowned Security Strategist Will Sturgeon, organizations are leaving behind inhibitions in trusting external organizations with their internal security and ‘handing control to experts who have built their reputations and businesses around getting security right.’ Organizations now realize that security is better catered to by specialized Managed Service Providers than the generalists who fill a corporate IT department. Also, the ROI calculations on going for MSS are fairly well understood.

Hosted solution and service framework

The concept of outsourcing the service component has been there in India for last few years. Slowly with the increase of cost of owning an integrated solution and at the same time maintaining the same, the enterprises in India are opening up to the option of outsourcing the solution itself to the service providers. Services like hosted secured e-mail security solution, managed authentication solution etc are now gearing up in the market. As this kind of service framework needs least capital investment in solution & resources for any organization, it is growing the interest in the industry and more number of organizations are getting into this kind of framework.

Mobile Security

With an increasingly distributed and mobile workforce who want their office to be available with them anywhere / anytime, organizations face the challenge of addressing the unique security needs of such an employee environment. Knowledge workers have to be protected while inside the organizational domain or outside it, and also while moving between the two. All this while ensuring that the principal objective of reliably making available IT resources to the workers on the move.

Governance & Compliance

Although governance and compliance (with risk management) requirements have been clearly voiced by the market for some time now, the important trend here is that corporations are looking to address the compliance mandates by using a unique set of products and services to create a customized, ongoing compliance objectives administration framework. This very visible trend is rapidly helping OEMs, system integrators, managed security players and customers to work together to create industry-specific comprehensive governance and compliance solutions.

The author is Head - Global Security Services, HCL Comnet.