Security Must Become a Business Enabler - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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April 11, 2008
Security Must Become a Business Enabler

In a keynote speech that Art Coviello gave at the RSA this past week, the EMC Executive Vice President and RSA Security Division President said, "We need to turn a longstanding stereotype of information security on its head and show how information-centric security can be an accelerator—and not an inhibitor—of business innovation and growth."

Almost everywhere you look, data security needs to work in lockstep with information management. Said Coviello, "Just look at the continued pace of security acquisitions by infrastructure companies and the integration of acquired technologies across all parts of the infrastructure."

But on the flip side, it's clear that many companies still see security as a necessary evil, or even a dis-abler. And according to Coviello, More than 80 percent of IT, security and business executives surveyed admit that their organizations have shied away from business innovation opportunities because of information security concerns, he said.

"This is what they said: 'Typically in most global organizations security is viewed at best as a necessary evil and more commonly as a necessary friction. This derives from security's primary focus on attempting to constrain behavior to prevent negative events. Although well-intentioned, the inevitable result is that security practitioners are not viewed as enablers but people preventing the business from doing what it needs to do."

And to change security into an innovation stopper, instead of drilling into the security shortcomings of every new idea, you have to start looking at things in terms of risk. It's just a change of mind, really, and hey, we security folks change our mind all the time. I mean, no we don't.