| Vendor community must collaborate to offer more secure future: BT While media attention focuses on the more sensational IT security threats that are now prevalent, from viruses and spam to spyware and Phishing, BT security experts believe that there are fundamental shifts occurring in business technology that make it vital for vendors to adopt a more collaborative approach. Four key trends are having a significant impact upon the security landscape businesses now face: convergence, flexible working, the regulatory environment, and collaboration itself. Security products must therefore be built based on open standards for interoperability to mirror the changing business landscape. Delivering technologies across unified networks is enabling CIOs to drive greater efficiencies, raise productivity, and enhance customer service. However, it presents greater security challenges should risks penetrate the single network environment. Meanwhile, organisations are realising the benefits of enabling their workforces to access the corporate network from any location, any time, but must implement stricter security measures to manage identity and access management. Tighter regulations that demand transparent audit trails and more sophisticated risk management procedures are also stretching IT departments as they battle to ensure that security is not the weakest link in the compliance chain. Collaboration, however, is the seismic shift at work. Ray Stanton, global head of BT’s business continuity, security and governance practice, said: “Collaboration is nothing new. Today, though, technology is redefining the level of collaboration that is possible: modern networks now allow industry rivals to share data to ward off fraud; businesses from different sectors are teaming up to co-develop products; extended supply chains are automating more shared processes to create efficiencies. This way of working, combined with the other trends, throws up serious implications for security. But it also offers valuable lessons for security vendors.” Business executives believe that collaboration is paramount to the future success of their businesses, according to research commissioned by BT and carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Sixty-four per cent already have up to ten collaborative relationships; while more than half said collaboration will either form an important part of their firm’s competitive advantage or will actually be central to their survival over the next three years. However, the task of bringing all of these networks, devices and businesses together is made significantly harder by the lack of open standards-based security solutions. Stanton continued: “End users know that in order to effectively and securely seize the opportunities of the new world order, common standards and technologies are needed. Without them, the job of configuring disparate systems to automatically gauge risk levels, and of allowing supplier and partner devices to communicate with a firm's IT network is made significantly harder. “Many vendors continue to launch proprietary tools, despite the customer appetite for interoperable products in today’s digital networked economy. Collaboration is re-sculpting the way business functions, and vendors would do well to jump on the ‘collaborative’ bandwagon not only because they have a duty to offer the best protection possible to their customers, but because it may also be critical to their own long-term survival.”
•Date: 27th March 2007 • Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: BC markets
|
