Detecting & Mitigating Security Risks

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IT security threats are multiplying quickly. One reason is that sophisticated hacking tools have grown abundant, greatly simplifying the effort required for intruders to compromise a network. Second, while hacking once largely constituted an intellectual exercise for security enthusiasts, hacking for profit has now become a business. Entire underground communities are springing up that focus on making money by invading corporate and government network resources.

Finally, there’s the changing nature of the software that is being installed throughout organizations. Applications now often share components and data with one another, using the enterprise network as their primary interface. There is appreciable business value in having networked applications share data enterprise-wide. When its application foundation operates holistically and correlates events, a company can become responsive to changing business conditions, such as when inventory runs low, when credit card fraud is in progress or when a machine is about to overheat.

With applications now depending to some degree on other networked applications, a level of complexity enters the picture that is accompanied by new security vulnerabilities. Bringing down one application, a costly event in itself, no longer has an isolated effect on just that application. Rather, given that application’s dependencies on other software, service downtime could ripple across the enterprise and impact any number of services. This situation has heightened the potential for compromised assets, company reputation and revenues.