5 Top Security Trends - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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September 21, 2007
5 Top Security Trends

While the day-to-day battle to keep our systems up and running is rather akin to fighting a battle in the trenches, sometimes it is helpful to find out what the generals are thinking looking down on the big battlefield from above and trying to build a long-term strategy for victory. The following 5 trends are from David DeWalt, the CEO of McAfee, taken from his keynote speech at a recent Information Week conference.

1) Large security vendors will continue to buy up the smaller security companies, meaning, "The security market will go through the same transition that other industries have," DeWalt said. "Right now you've got 50 or 60 vendors out there, and customers are faced with the questions of how do you integrate all those solutions, and create interoperability between them? It's not sustainable."

That means security will start coming packaged in the form of unified threat management, or what's also being called endpoint security, which I blogged about here. This will ease up the security pressures on IT managers and allow them to control and manage systems through a single console.

2) Compliance requirements will keep getting more stringent in trying to keep up with the ever escalating cyberthreats. "There's a lot of legislation around industries forcing them to comply with various standards for customer protection," said DeWalt, including PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements for public companies, and the many others.

DeWalt believes the government has gone too far, causing U.S. companies to become burdened with too much red tape, threatening America's competitive edge.

3) The growing movement towards protecting data. "Traditional security has always been concentrated on the perimiter, on endpoint devices, particularly with firewalls," DeWalt noted. "The focus now is on thinking about data-oriented security" by classifying certain types of data so that it cannot leave the corporate network or company-owned devices. And as so much of data is threatened by insider attacks, this type of protection will become ever-more essential.

4) The many new challenges that will come from server virtualization. "Virtualization is an amazing juggernaut in terms of security risk," said DeWalt, "managing and protecting a single physical endpoint is much different than managing security virtually," DeWalt said.

5) The emergence of more mobile devices will continue to offer hackers new attack vectors, forcing security to deal with constantly emerging threats. Said DeWalt, "We're in inning two of a nine-inning game here." And in this continuous battle, sometimes security will be ahead of the attackers, and sometimes we'll be behind.