Sunday, July 15, 2001

Network Security Industry Must Undergo Paradigm Shift

There has been a long-standing portrait of the security industry as one of guards, guns, and gates possessing such things as locks, vaults, monitoring cameras, poison gases, and electronic perimeters. This analogy has outlived its usefulness as the industry goes through a natural evolution into what the Yankee Group believes is best described as the "triple-D" industry--of disease, drugs, and doctors.

According to Matthew Kovar, director of the Yankee Group's Security Solutions & Services research and consulting practice, "Security vulnerabilities and threats, like diseases, are dynamic and can mutate or combine with each other to make a more severe impact with far greater detrimental effects to IT systems. Drugs are countermeasures that are put in place and include solutions such as anti-virus, firewalls, intrusion detection, content screening, and virtual private networks." Kovar warns, "Security professionals, like medical professionals, must interact with a patient continuously in order to monitor and diagnose in real time the security health of an organization."

Kovar advises, "If you researched and invested in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostic equipment manufacturers, or for-profit health organizations in the 1970s and 1980s, then you already know who will be the winners in the security market. "The Report, "Security Industry Evolves into 'Triple-D' Industry of Disease, Drugs, and Doctors: Investors Beware!," shows the geometric growth in diseases, threats, and vulnerabilities, only to be outdone by the complexities and challenges of an organization to secure its applications, hardware and software platforms, and network and security equipment against known and unknown vulnerabilities and threats.