Enterprise Security is no longer just IT concern,It's also becoming a business concern!

Today’s Organizations worldwide have ranked IT security as one of their priorities as increasingly sophisticated attacks, new data protection regulations, and most recently insider fraud and data breaches, threaten to disrupt and irreparably damage their businesses.

With ever-changing technologies, IT teams can count on the amount of security challenges they have to deal with on daily basis. Today, apart from ensuring trusted interactions and protecting the information, IT managers have to create a secure environment for newly emerging technology like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

More than 80% of IT managers think enterprises with a BYOD policy have a competitive advantage. Though each year, companies around the world spend a lot in buying new computers in bulk. But after the concept of BYOD has taken place among enterprises, companies are now allowing employees to bring their own products into the office and use them for corporate activities. This in turn help companies to invest their budget in other technologies.

As it is rightly said that there is no free lunches in this world. This saying is well suited for BYOD, as it not only allows employees to bring their own devices at work but also open the gates for BYOA (Bring Your Own Application), which in turn requires robust enterprise security.

According to survey, 53% of employees use their own devices for work and 29% of the global workforce have 3 or more devices. BYOD poses real risks for corporate enterprises managing unsecure applications, malware and data loss, data breach risks.

Network security continued to see good growth as it witnessed market consolidation with Sourcefire acquired by CISCO, Stonesoft acquired by McAfee, and Cyberoam acquired by Sophos. With changing landscape of cyber threats and growing adoption of disruptive technologies like mobility, virtualization and cloud is pushing security vendors to expand their network security solution capability and merging of technologies, for example virtualized firewalls, running firewalls with hypervisor.

In, July 2013, Cisco acquired Sourcefire, a maker of Network Security hardware and software for $2.7bn. The acquisition is considered to have worked positively for CISCO and strengthened its position in the security market. In India report suggested that the security team has doubled in size in the past couple of months.

One of the major announcements in last fiscal months was the acquisition of ThreatGRID. This announcement addressed customers need to combat zero-day attacks and Advanced Persistent Threats(APT). Cisco also broadened its advanced Malware protection and Data Cneter security offering with this announcement added by Pravin Srinivasan, Lead, Security, Sales, Cisco, India & Saarc.

In the coming years, internet of things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) are going to be the focus areas for network security player. The industry has still not forgotten how the Stuxnet virus brought down Iran’s nuclear program to a screeching halt a few years ago.

In summary, we can think of more challenges and likely solutions to managing identities and ensuring data security in this BYOD conundrum, but the truth is nobody knows for sure how it is going to mature in future, what platforms are going to settle down eventually and weather employees are going to even pursue BYOD aggressively. So, there can never be a one size fits all kind of solution and each organizations has to carefully evaluate all options before formulating a BYOD strategy.


Rajesh Rangani