The New Enterprise Security Model: Ninjas > Knights
By Mike Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-11-22
The BBC recently posted an interesting article about the evolution of Enterprise Security. The author, Tim Weber, equates the traditional style of enterprise security to castle walls and moats, or, as I like to call it, the Knight style security. Weber touches on various reasons why the Knights are no longer sufficient in protecting the kingdom. In the end, Weber suggests that a more stealthy, portable approach to security: Ninjas.
Obviously, Weber does not suggest hiring a bunch of highly trained and stealthy killing machines to protect our enterprise's most confidential data (although, without question, that would work). To better understand Weber's analogy, we must first better understand the old style and the changes to the technology landscape that make these traditional security procedures obsolete. In the past, our data stayed in-house. There was seldom need to transfer our data electronically outside of our own infrastructure. Since there was little need to accommodate easy outflow of data, we could build a strong defense around our network, making it difficult for anyone to gain access. We could easily control one point for the input and output of data, and that system worked.However, over time, our network had to be connected to more and more places. Our tiny little drawbridge, which provided ample security for our network, could not handle the huge amount of traffic that needed to flow in and out of our network. Therefore, much of our operation had to move outside the walls of castle in order to gain the necessary freedoms to properly interact with the rest of the world. This includes off-site employees/offices, third-party firms, the company web presence, and social media. With all of our data flowing around all willy-nilly, the walls and moat of our castle are useless. Thus, a more mobile and stealthy approach to security is required. Since transporting castle walls and trebuchets is too resource intensive and likely ineffective against the latest pirate attacks, we can utilize smaller, more effective measures like, as Weber suggests, user-friendly data encryption and security embedded into hardware. These Ninja security measures will surely help keep the Pirates at bay.
About the Author:
Mike Marr is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
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