Attacks on the horizon

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Do we advise customers to invest in DLP products? Broadly speaking no. That said I think there is a portion of data leakage being a serious and sensitive issue that can be solved technically. This is the portion that we are focused on building out in our products set which is the accidental data leakage piece, trying to assist people copying company accounts on to an un-encrypted USB device.

Compliance as well is a serious issue now. Investing in stand alone compliance solutions is really not on the option sheet for most companies now but regulation continue to run strong and in times of economic pressure greater sensitivity is applied to them still.

How is the Sophos IT team internally preparing to handle the crisis? How has the financial downturn affected your budgets?

Our internal IT team have two significant challenges. The first one is the need to innovate, the need to look at new business process tools.

We, like everyone else, want to take advantage of social media, like Facebook and LinkedIn. We want mobility and as much as everyone else taking advantage of these tools means a change in how we think about the IT environment, we consider a grand proportion of our network, our users as being de-parameterised. We seem much of our corporate network rescinding at the same time clearly protecting our corporate assets and protecting our customers means running lockdown areas of networks.

Right now IT is investing heavily in virtualisation technologies, thin client access technologies and mobile technologies so that we can provide our users with the flexibility required.

As for the affect on our budget, I think we are possibly an exception to many organisations in that being an IT service provider we have to continue to invest in that infrastructure to serve our customers. We are not actually cutting budgets, we are still growing them as it is such a core function.

Most IT managers tend to look at security and storage as separate elements still. How is Sophos working to remedy this image and bring the two together in manager mindsets?

I think this is a broader issue of operations infrastructure and security. They are very much still separate functions in most organisations and lots of analysts have talked about this convergence but it still has not really happened. If we ignore the separation of people working on these problems and approach it from a technology perspective and we look at the trends affecting our customers’ IT environments then they need to come together and quickly.

Increasingly as we look at service as a software (SaS), cloud computing, the fact that more of us are accessing data on the road and that storage might be out in the world and not locked down in the server room and providing high availability services to computers in our corporate network we really have to consider that the security model or enforcement points we traditionally had must change.

I like to think of it as security being application and data-centric. I think there are definitely some integration points with storage and security but I would not go far as to say that Sophos is a company that actually wants to go and offer storage services itself.

Do you believe there are any specific Middle East trends in security that sets the region apart from others globally?

I think there are a few interesting ones, firstly we are seeing a much higher adoption of virtual desktops in the Middle East then we are seeing in other countries.

This is interesting because if I look at Europe and the Americas then our customers are talking about these things as better solutions for mobility and doing operational control but we are not really seeing large scale adoption.

We have linked that heavily in Europe to the fact that people are not prepared to invest to be able to take advantage of the potential operational improvements of technologies like virtual desktops.

What are the biggest challenges facing IT managers today?

I would say aside from the previously discussed financial and political challenges it would be a bit of a role shift.

IT was traditionally focused on providing some core infrastructure services and security that consisted of having an anti-virus agent. It has been increasingly tasked with providing data security which I think is a much more complicated problem. Consider what it takes to write a DLP policy. It involves working with senior management and HR, defining policies, with finance and each of the individual teams to gain acceptance of what is and is not acceptable legitimate behaviour.

IT needs to understand the data of business processes much more to be able to assist with that problem, so I do think there is a bit of a role shift going on and it will continue to shift.

In technology terms I think ‘consumerisation’ is a huge challenge. What I mean by that is the increasing prevalence by end-users to make technology decisions on their own. You can link that to a few other trends like SaS for example. Now where I can go online and adopt applications on my own, access webmail, get limitless storage. It is very easy for me as an end- user to bypass the structure that IT provides and put my data into the cloud. I can provide my own infrastructure if I am not happy. I am seeing lots of customers struggling with a user base that wants to take advantage of these tools and IT struggling to stop them.

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