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Adapt or be hacked

As an industry, the security sector has much work to do. So says Wayne Olsen, security business unit manager at Datacentrix. He says vendors within this space have not traditionally been adaptive enough to keep up with the speed at which the threat landscape is changing.

“Although it is probably more fair to say that it is actually the infrastructure that is non-adaptive to ever-increasing numbers of threats,” he continues.

And there’s no doubt that breaches are on the rise. Forrester Research, in its ‘Predictions 2017: Cybersecurity Risks Intensify’ study, forecasts that this year in excess of 500 000 Internet of Things (IoT) devices will suffer a compromise, a Fortune 1000 company will fail due to a cyber breach, and that President Trump will face a cyber crisis within the first 100 days of his term.

“This type of statement begs the question: ‘If you saw it coming, why didn’t you stop it?’ Security has been within the top three concerns for the CIO worldwide for the past decade and there’s good reason for this. In fact, the Society for Information Management’s (SIM) recently-released trends analysis for 2017 noted that 36% of IT leaders saw security as their number one concern.

“One of the major challenges within this space is that, while companies are aware of the importance of safeguarding themselves and are frantically introducing new security technologies, these solutions are siloed and thus operate in isolation,” Olsen explains.

The solution to this dilemma? Getting the foundation right by deploying architectures that customers can lean on to deploy new technologies that will work effectively together. “This is of particular importance when it comes to cloud-enabled capabilities and applications. Without the correct architecture in place, adding layer upon layer of technology is like building a brick wall onto mud – it’s just going to fall over at some point.

“There is no silver bullet when it comes to security,” says Olsen. “It is inevitable that an organisation will be attacked at some point; what’s important is how the severity of the attack is mitigated. Going back to basics by ensuring that it has an adaptable architecture in place and ongoing staff education, as well as the correct, regularly reviewed policies and the technologies needed to enforce these policies will stand a company in good stead.”

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