Problem
During recent years the enterprise IT systems went through significant changes. To stay competitive, companies strive to achieve better efficiency by optimizing all of their operations. The supply chains are moving to the most cost efficient geographical locations and larger components of the chain are being outsourced. The employees are becoming more mobile and more efforts are invested into supporting mobile devices such as laptops, smart phones and USB keys. The Cloud and SaaS infrastructure are being adopted to optimize capital expenditure and employees are expected to be more productive by leveraging the advances in collaboration and communication technologies.
The IT systems are expected to support all these changes and provide reliability, scalability and robustness.
The information is becoming more fluid and agile and resides on multiple systems within and beyond the boundaries of organizations. Information is a major asset of a company and a source of its competitive advantage.
In this environment, we are witnessing the emergence of significant security risks. With all the instant communication and information sharing channels we are witnessing a growing number of unintentional cases of information loss. Employees are failing to identify sensitive information and are mistakenly leaking sensitive private information to the external world. In some instances such mistakes can lead to millions of dollars of damages. The loss of portable devices containing private information may lead to the same consequences.
The trend of outsourcing will continue and it is expected to become even more sophisticated. In order to achieve an effective cooperation, some information needs to be shared with external partners. However, some opportunistic collaborators may try to steal the intellectual property shared during the collaboration period. Even during good economic times some employees try to take company intellectual property with them while jumping ship to a competitor. The research shows that this trend becomes even stronger during economic downturns, when people lose their job security.
Together with unprecedented increase in complexity of the IT systems and in data mobility, we are witnessing growing sophistication of the hacker attacks. Sometimes those attacks are sponsored by government organizations and use sophisticated methods of surveillance both in real and virtual domains. Both these trends create a security threat that we have never experienced before.
