Like the old adage that ‘he who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount,’ enterprises today are bounding along on the back of a particularly large and fearsome tiger. It’s called “consumer technology” and its shape is outlined by the myriad of devices and services that modern information workers are bringing to work and using – or want to use – to get their jobs done.
When it comes to security, it’s planning and execution – not the size of the budget – that matter.With the U.S. economy showing the barest signs of recovering from the recession, the consensus among economists is for a very flat recovery to continue through 2011. For IT security staff, that means tight IT budgets and flat spending, at best.
By George V. Hulme
As some consumers play a growing role in the fight against online fraud and phishing, others need more education on the problem. That’s the bottom line from a panel discussion that included risk managers from Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and PayPal.
By George Hulme
In her much anticipated talk, acting senior director for cyberspace by President Obama, Melissa Hathaway generally reviewed what we already knew, and what has been previously reported when it comes to federal cyber security: The White House should coordinate IT security efforts; private sector needs to play a bigger role in securing cyberspace (hey, wasn’t this also the mantra for Richard Clarke’s National Strategy to Secure Cyber Space?); and a handful of agencies should be responsible for the security of federal computer networks.
By George V. Hulme
Last year, Craig Mundie issued a call to arms for a more “trustworthy Internet” — not that Microsoft has been entirely successful at implementing its arguably more humble Trustworthy Computing initiative. But let’s not let the computing industry’s failure to bring forward operating systems, web servers, or even Web browsers that don’t get gummed with malware, or pwned by exploits stop us for shooting for the Holy Grail of computing: a complete chain-of-trust throughout the Internet, from the bottom to the top, called End to End trust.
By George V. Hulme
Not so surprising, the state elders of cryptography had a few things to say about the security of cloud computing — but with little agreement.
Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems, kicked off the cloud security discussion, stating that while securing the cloud computing model will have its challenges, they’ll be overcome in due time, and that ultimately cloud computing will become as pervasive as, well, clouds. “Cloud computing will come to where no real program and data will be ran on the computers of the company that is using the program,” he says.
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