INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Mobile Technology
Adaptive trust needed to secure mobilefirst wireless enterprise
The first priority of defence used to be to secure the perimeter. But changes are shifting the old concept of a fixed boundary in mobile-first wireless enterprises at a particularly dangerous time, writes Gamal Emara, Country Manager, UAE, Aruba, a HPE company.
A few years ago, organisations only needed to contend with lone hackers seeking no more than bragging rights for breaching a system. Now, the threat vectors range from global criminals seeking financial gain to nationstates trying to steal trade secrets or blackmail their victims.
And the threats are escalating with attackers increasingly targeting the proliferating number of IoT devices that are coming online. Market researcher Gartner expects that some 6.4 billion“ things” will be connected to the IoT this year, up 30 % from 2015. That rapid increase also has implications for enterprise security.
Consider, for example, the muchpublicised breach of a national retailer a few years back. The attackers gained entry through the systems of an HVAC contractor, which they compromised after an employee of the contractor opened a phishing email. Welcome to the enterprise world’ s new security nightmare reality: your perimeter now extends to everyone( and everything) who works for your company’ s third party contractors. If that doesn’ t wake you up like an ice cold shower, nothing will.
Back in the era of fixed perimeters, it was relatively easy to identify what to trust and what not to trust. Anything inside the perimeter was OK; anything outside was treated with suspicion. But when people and devices are mobile, they move fluidly and freely across the perimeter. Instead of focusing on the perimeter, we have to focus on the user and the user’ s apps and devices— in context. Contextual understanding means assigning access policies according to the context in which specific users, apps and devices access data resources. You’ ll also need to be prepared to address a myriad of new challenges. What kind of device is being used? What applications are on the device? Who is using the device? What time of day is it? From where is the access taking place? Every one of us can appear quite different to our network depending
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