ENTERPRISE SECURITY: Safety On The Line

While leveraging on the power the Internet has brought with it, securing
corporate information traversing through such a public domain has become one of
the prime concerns for businesses. Solution partners need to address it with the
right security package.

Businesses are increasingly transforming themselves into knowledge driven
entities in their pursuit to achieve excellence. They constantly incorporate new
technologies and processes to remain competitive in this dynamic business
environment. However, most of the changes that take place within these
organizations are directed towards achieving their overall goals and objectives.

Secondly, the Internet has radically transformed the way businesses operate.
More and more businesses across the world have started relying heavily on the
Internet to conduct business transactions.

The two instances above depict the dynamics of a growing business environment
and the corresponding increase in its complexities. This brings to the fore the
importance of securing the business environment from external threats.

GROWING DEPENDENCE ON TECHNOLOGY

Most companies across the world are heavily relying upon technology to
achieve business results. This dependence on the use of IT has led to widespread
demand for enterprise solutions like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP),
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product
Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Business Intelligence (BI).

It is known that not all enterprise application deployments have been
successful and not all companies have derived optimal benefits out of their
enterprise solutions. One of the reasons for this is because they have not
incorporated applications with adequate security measures to safeguard their
data and business results emanating there from.

This leads to time and cost overrun. It means that information has been made
more accessible to users whether they are employees, customers or business
partners. Evidently, more number of access points means more chances for
unauthorized prying eyes to discover and exploit sensitive data. Further
exploitation of sensitive data can happen from either within or outside the
organization.

DEPLOYING THE RIGHT SOLUTION

While implementing IT solutions within organizations and leveraging on the
advantages, solution partners need to evaluate and assess what security
solutions confirm with their customer's organizational requirements. They
should also ensure the 24x7 availability of applications running within the
business environment. With data and information becoming the most important
corporate assets of organizations today, security has become one of the most
important prerogatives of corporates today.

Most enterprise applications provide significant value to organizational
processes and are key enablers to enterprise profitability and competitiveness.
This is why securing enterprise applications must be seen as an ongoing process
and not a one-time issue.

SECURING APPLICATIONS

The first step in securing enterprise applications must be to build
enterprise application architectures that have inherent built-in security
measures. Studies on security have shown that while threats external to the
organization have been a continued concern, it is important to understand that
more than 50% of the intrusions whether intentional or unintentional are
internal to the organization. The built-in security within enterprise
applications will be the primary screen to avoid unauthorized access and
manipulation of corporate information.

An effective method of providing built-in security to the application would
be to concentrate on the layer of application code that controls the access to
the forms at the user interface level. This would act as the first step to
protect applications and information.

There have been instances where companies have used generic named users like
"Purchase User", rather than actually naming the users, which has
later created problems for them. Firstly, using a generic named user is illegal
as per the licensing policies of software vendors. Secondly, when two-three or
more people use the same generic user, it becomes impossible to record and track
as to which user did what. This opens up the system to a huge security risk.

FIREWALL TO GUARD APPLICATIONS

The next level where security has to be addressed would be to secure the
host where the application resides. This would entail placing a firewall running
on top of all applications. However, it has been found that while firewalls are
quite effective in securing applications and information, they create another
visible problem that arises with increase in the number of users within a
corporate network or integrated infrastructure of the company. As the number of
users increases, the use of firewalls significantly decreases the network's
performance.

Going further, the new generation security platforms should combine
effectiveness with performance by providing multi-gigabit firewall for data
centers that require this level of throughput and state-of-the-art filtering in
order to secure and safeguard servers. Unlike traditional firewall appliances,
which integrate policy control and forwarding functions while using multiple
firewalls load balanced by a web switch for achieving scalability, the firewall
should be able to separate the control and forwarding functions.

This means that the new security architecture will use a dedicated firewall
appliance that handles the functions of policy management, session acceptance
and session management. After a packet is passed through the inspection engine,
it should be accelerated using a high-speed web-switch.

FACTORING IN THE COST

While providing security at all levels starts with providing built-in
security at the application level, it should be spread across all levels of the
IT and network infrastructure of the organization. However, from an enterprise
standpoint, though security is a big concern, keeping operational costs low is
also a major issue.

This means that when different security products run at different levels,
overheads in terms of manpower and management increase along with the
complexity. However, if products implemented have got in-built security within
them, it reduces the complexity to a great extent and it also enables a network
engineer with a little additional training to effectively run the
infrastructure.

Since enterprises today need the best products in security, it has resulted
in collaboration between pure security sellers, application and networking
vendors. The result is that today enterprises have a wide variety of products
and solutions to choose from.

However, once enterprises have implemented security measures at all levels,
it is important for them to understand that their pursuit in securing data and
networks does not stop there. It has to be seen as a continuous function and
there is no "end it all" solution to security.

Gopal Madnani is Country
Manager of SSA Global India