The threat landscape has changed in a big way in the past decade. From mild website hacking to open security breaches, today the security threat has become covert and planned. At a national level, countries are having organized cyber war. With every nation relying heavily on IT systems, cyber war is a reality that can instantly cripple any country�s economy. The recent advent of Stuxnet is an example of this. Stuxnet is an unprecedented malware that the world never saw before. And to build something of this scale, would require at least a 50 member team and three years time. Late last year, this malware was detected in some 100,000 systems globally. India is the third largest infected nation, after Iran and Indonesia. This reinforces the existence of organized cyber warfare, which is the biggest trend in security landscape today.
There was a time when there was a high network level vulnerability as operating systems were unsecure. But today this is not so. Operating systems have become highly secured and the vulnerability is at the application level. Moving on, the advent of Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and more, have started to pave way for a fresh wave of security problems. Social engineering is the current flavor in the threat landscape but with the rise of mobile devices like smart phones, tablets and more, mobile and wireless will drive the future trends in this space.
Today the awareness about the need of security is much more than what it used to be earlier. Organizations � small, medium and large understand the pressing need to have a secured network. But the hitch exists when it comes to deploying security measures. Not everyone is able to do it in right way especially the SME/SMBs. The businesses need to understand that though one would not get any returns from investing on security but doing the same is imperative. Hence, the biggest challenge for a CIO in today�s world is get a dedicated budget to ramp up the company�s security standards. The industry today is both, an exciting and challenging place for entrepreneurs to be. Entrepreneurs need to have an open mind have the ability to learn and unlearn as the situation demands.
The author is the CEO & Co-Founder of iViZ