Data is the lifeblood of a business in this information age. One who loses sight of the importance of data in business does at their own peril. Data is what gives one a competitive edge. Data is everywhere.
Since the coming of the IT to the forefront of conscious attention, the IT security landscape is undergoing sea-changes. Naturally enough, the rapid evolution of the security landscape is the order of the day. This had led to a situation where security products and solutions have also witnessed changes over the years.
In the past, it was an easy proposition to keep corporate data protected by keeping it within an established perimeter-protected by established access controls and passwords. With the mind-boggling increase in the traction of smartphones and tablets that model has been broken asunder. Added to this, file sharing services which empowers users with accessibility and usability is adding to the concerns of information security managers. These are not trends that organizations can ignore at their disadvantage. They urgently need solutions to help secure confidential data and limit access.
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| Vamsicharan Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM, India/South Asia |
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| Rahul Agarwal Executive Director, Commercial Business Segment, Lenovo India |
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| Yogesh Sawant Director, Partner Sales and Field Alliance Organization, India, Hitachi Data System |
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| Tarun Kaura Director, Technology Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec |
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| Rajesh Awasthi Director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India |
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| Govind Rammurthy MD & CEO, eScan |
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| Sunil Sharma VP Sales, India & SAARC Cyberoam |
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| Neeraj Mediratta CEO Ace Data Devices Pvt. Ltd |
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| Edgar Dias Regional Director, India, Brocade |
While supporting BYOD; securing data resources of the enterprise will continue to be the biggest concern for CIOs and CTOs. “Hence we see higher implementation of enterprise grade mobile computing devices (for eg: The X1 Carbon business ultra-portable or Lenovo ThinkPad Tablets), as they afford the same level of user experience with added security features to end users,” says Rahul Agarwal, Executive Director, Commercial Business Segment, Lenovo India.
Edgar Dias, Regional Director, India, Brocade, says “Just a few years ago, security could be accomplished with a combination of user credentials and physical access control to a wired network port. But today, with the average user carrying three or more wireless devices with increasing levels of sophistication, protecting assets from malicious attacks can present significant challenges to IT. Fortunately, there is a broad range of security options available from Brocade “out of the box” or from any of the diverse eco-system of security providers from Brocade that enable organizations to confidently meet their security policies and objectives.&rdqu o;
It is a truism that security is becoming complex with the each passing day. A decade earlier businesses were happy by giving their employees logins to the networks and asking them not to divulge their passwords to anyone. That was the end of security advice.
Needless to say, the security scene is far more complex and IT managers are under pressure to secure the company’s digital assets and network. With the cloud computing becoming preferred choice of the business more so in uncertain economic landscape, these are hey-days for the cyber villains who find cloud as greener pastures for making money by hacking cloud infrastructure.
Over the last 10 to 15 years, threats have transformed from connection-based to content-based. Traditional security technologies have not kept up with this evolution and are no longer able to differentiate between malicious and legitimate content.
Need for Innovation
Looking at the ongoing trends of the malware, and other cyber-attacks, it is more than important that you have a special team which constantly monitors the internet and the infection vectors, to mitigate the attacks carried by malware writers; you need to be one step ahead of them.
As the incidence of security breaches grows, it is resulting in the increasing adoption of the latest security solutions even further. R&D plays an important role in the innovation process which is increasingly vital for the organization to position their product as the most trusted. A quality investment in R & D activities results in the advent of innovative technology that propels new products and services to the market place which all set to rule the roost.This drives the demand for right technology investment so that it may be possible to swiftly discover and blunt the catastrophic effects of a breach before loss of critical data becomes a reality. Here comes the role of an innovative framework of security controls.
“This being said you need to have an infrastructure to carry on R & D on these attacks. We have experienced skilled people who do R & D on ongoing malware trends and help developing methods to mitigate those attacks,” says Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan.
eScan has innovated eScan Security Network, which adds another layer in anti-virus protection. This additional layer of protection ensures a prompt response and an unprecedented detection level that enhances the overall protection. eScan Security Network falls in as one of the most prominent feature within our SOHO products, continuously monitoring and providing analysis of real-life threats on a global scale, thus protecting all connected eScan users against new and emerging malware.
Underscoring the need of R&D, Sunil Sharma - VP Sales, India & SAARC at Cyberoam, says, “Innovation is a part of Cyberoam’s DNA. Hence, Cyberoam attributes its proactive product development to its ability to innovate by understanding market needs. Cyberoam ensures that required infrastructure for research, analysis and re-creating or simulating the needed scenario is available. Cyberoam’s R&D process enables us to deliver a product of global quality that helps us address our customers’ needs and challenges efficiently and pro-actively.
Cyberoam’s R&D process involves a process comprising of 4 stages, namely Requirements Gathering, Evaluation, Planning and Development Cycle.
Cloud Security
Companies are increasingly aware of the business value that cloud computing brings and are taking steps towards transition to the cloud. But despite opening up some new possibilities for businesses, it is also throwing up new challenges. These challenges range from the implementation of cloud technology, to securing application and infrastructure, ensuring interoperability and governance at the same time. Fundamentally it is important for the cloud services providers to be able to assure the security of these new models in order to build trust and confidence. Vamsicharan Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM, India/South Asia, says, “The key to establishing trust in these new models is choosing the right cloud computing model for your organization. Place the right workloads in the right model with the right security mechanisms.”
IBM offers a broad portfolio of security products and services to help build more secure cloud environments with more intelligent security policies.
IBM Security solutions provide layered protection and deep insight across the infrastructure, when deployed in private and hybrid cloud environments. Capabilities such as federated single sign-on and privileged user management help provide simplified access and control across multiple cloud services for potentially millions of users. Database monitoring and web application scanning help reduce data and application vulnerabilities.
IBM solutions also support security compliance with patch management for endpoints and virtualized machines. What’s more, these solutions increase visibility and enhance auditing of cloud activity within multi-tenant environments.
Over the past year, we have seen a steady growth of cloud adoption in India. Almost all IT vendors in India have already made their presence felt in the market with their cloud offerings. Even global players operating in India have tailored their cloud offerings to suit the domestic market. Cloud has been successful in India for multiple reasons. One of the most significant reasons is the demand from global companies, which is met by the IT industry in India. The micro, small, and medium businesses, which tend to be budget-constrained when it comes to hiring information technology (IT) professionals and building IT infrastructure, find cloud computing beneficial in bringing down the cost of ownership. Productivity gains and cost savings are other factors driving adoption of cloud in India.
Ace Data Devices is in the business of providing data backup, archival, storage and disaster recovery solutions that are specifically suited for business environment. Neeraj Mediratta- CEO, Ace Data Devices Pvt. Ltd, says, “Our cloud solution is fully secure with FIPS certified AES 256 bit encryption before moving the data out of the customer’s network. This helps us ensure that data is secure. The encryption keys are defined by the customer’s system administrator. Apart from these key software features, our environment is protected with firewalls, security tools and anti-virus tools being updated regularly to ensure that the data is safe.”
BYOD and Encryption
The popularity of BYOD is increasing fast. The advent of BYOD has allowed application availability at anytime, from anywhere, and helps business slash procurement costs. This is because organsiations are in the process of allowing employees to bring their personally owned computers, smartphones, and tablets into the workplace and access corporate applications.
However, the increasing popularity of these devices has the potential of creating several problems for IT departments as they attempt to mitigate risk, and this signals a tough future for PC and laptop manufacturers. When it comes to BYOD, one of the most overriding threats is the loss and theft of these devices.
In order to address the balance between usability and security, organizations are taking a variety of steps. Apart from the vulnerability of the devices, the sensitive company data residing on these devices is also at risk. Here, encryption software can play a part in mitigating risks.
Most of the security threats plaguing BYOD are also common in mobility. There is a need on the part of the companies to encrypt data at the device level. Companies should also ensure that the user is not allowed to override it.
Rajesh Awasthi, Director Telecom & Cloud Service Provider, NetApp India, says “Since we are primarily a storage and data management company, which is where customers keep their data be it enterprise data or business applications they are hosting, their concerns are two-fold basically.
As part of infrastructure, one of the things which they want from us from security perspective is that their data should be secure when it is in play (at rest). And when the data is on the move, they should also be secure when they are in the move. When it is stored in the disk drives of the storage system it should be secure. Here NetApp supports encrypted disk drive so the data that get stored on encrypted disk drive is safe. Only those people who are authorized can have access these data. When it comes to data in motion, for SAN Access we have a technology which we license to one of our partners, called Brocade who encrypt the data."
Ensuring Data Recovery
“Our tools run background verification checks for all the data that we backup. Apart from the continuous regular checks, we do additionally run data integrity and restore validation processes to ensure that the data is recoverable. All our customers enjoy regular recovery drills of the data and methodology of their choice to ensure data recovery,” says Neeraj Mediratta of Ace-Data.
De-Duplication
As part of our ongoing effort to help customers further optimize their storage capacity and better manage large and ever increasing amounts of data, Hitachi Data Systems also plans to introduce a purpose built backup appliance later this year. This appliance will be based on de -duplication IP developed by Hitachi Data Systems that enables faster, more reliable and more cost-effective data protection. We have strong relationships with our current partners in the area of de-duplication and will continue to leverage their technology to help our customers overcome the challenges they are facing with rapid data growth. We see the HDS purpose built backup appliance as complementary to our current de-duplication product line. Our perspective is that a broad portfolio of solutions gives us the freedom to solve our customers’ issues with the most effective technology. We will provide more details on our PBBA at a later date.
Internet of Things (IOT)
“Internet, ‘Network of networks’ may very well be termed as one of mankind’s finest inventions and ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) could be pitted as the optimal enablement of this invention, owing to its scale and utility. Internet is visibly making every object or machine around us smarter, right from connected smart televisions, medical equipment, security cameras,routers, trash-cans, baby monitors, toothbrushes, sports gear with embedded sensors and smart refrigerators. We will soon live in an ecosystem where these ‘dumb devices’ would acquire intelligence through an inbuilt OS enabling the devices to get connected with other paired/authorized devices.
The dynamism of the Internet of Things is one of its most challenging features as most of us in our day-to-day lives might come across many of these smart devices, yet be unaware of the consequences that might pop-up if they are not secured appropriately. More the connected devices, greater is the range of "significant" security challenges across data privacy and physical security that have the potential to disrupt functionality of consumers and businesses in new ways.
“Essentially there needs to be a two-step approach to mitigate the security risks posed through connected devices. First, an embedded security software for in-device security can enable devices to filter, as well as prevent proliferation of threats. Secondly from a manufacture’s perspective, major software vendors should figure out how to notify customers and provide patches for vulnerabilities. Manufacture of devices that connect to the Internet need to notify customers of an oncoming security problem and also design user-friendly ways to apply patches,” says Tarun Kaura, Director, Technology Sales, India & SAARC, Symantec.
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