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February - 2015 - issue > CXO View Point

New Darwinism in Enterprise Security

Hemal Patel
MD & CEO-Cyberoam Technologies
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Hemal Patel
The year gone by witnessed a spate of malware attacks and network breach incidents that ambushed world's best guarded enterprise networks at global corporate giants and several military, government and critical infrastructure establishments. Malware mayhem continues and cyber-crime and attack methods continue to evolve. In an exceedingly digitally connected world, one small mistake or a click event can trigger an influx of sophisticated attacks in enterprise networks, leaving businesses wide open to evolving threats and cyber security risks. Researchers, analysts, bloggers, journalists all have offered varying theories and analysis into this growing menace of evolved attacks, citing presence of critical security gaps in IT and network environments as the most significant vulnerability, putting organizational networks at greater risk.
Businesses and organizations emerge increasingly connected and digital, and at the same time, security environment continues to grow more complex - becoming nearly unmanageable for most CSOs, CISOs and other security managers. For security executives, it has turned out a catch-22 situation, for on one hand, threats and attack methods are increasing in frequency, scope and severity and on the other hand, monitoring connected networks and user activities in a drastically evolved technology landscape is turning more stressful and ironically a thankless job at the same time.

IT and Security decisions turning into a boardroom battle
Internet brings us a digital economy and other avenues like cloud, virtualization, mobility, BYOD, IoT ecosystem and more. Progressive enterprises and established organizations alike yearn to seize this opportunity and catalyze unprecedented operational efficiencies and technology capabilities for their workforce, partners and customers. But there's a flip side too. Most CXOs remain at loggerheads in turning the disruptive into productive. This is because there's a lack of understanding into how security ties with business and IT / technology decisions. For example, a CSO and a CIO may argue over a question -whether going for cloud or virtualization can lead to new security challenges!
Aligning CIO and CSO interests requires finding the right solution around below aspects,
Understanding critical IT and Network security gaps
. Primary causes that lead to security weaknesses
. How new security risks and challenges emerge from technology decisions (cloud, virtualization, BYOD etc)
. Potential risks and outcome of such gaps

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