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Innovation bringing security and management risks
February 15, 2012The IT world is changing. Enterprise mobility, virtualization, cloud computing and a number of other prominent emerging technologies are forcing businesses to rethink service delivery and security. Throughout this transition, many organizations are realizing that their legacy systems cannot handle the security and management needs created by innovative IT tools, a recent CompTIA study found.
According to the news source, innovation is breeding risk in the corporate IT world. The core issue is that the current wave of new technologies hitting businesses are all about making data, applications and other IT services more accessible to employees. They are also adding another layer of mobility to employee devices, making it difficult for organizations to secure data and protect endpoints.
Tim Herbert, vice president of research at CompTIA, explained that no single technology dominates the current risk climate. Instead, a combination of increased connectivity, mobility and interconnectivity between devices is creating security and management challenges.
"Billions of devices connect to the Internet daily, and with each touch point there's a potential for new security vulnerabilities. With more data being produced and touched by more people, the potential for data loss or leakage grows accordingly," said Herbert.
The security issues associated with the current enterprise IT climate are considerable, and respondents to the CompTIA study are clearly being affected. Approximately 65 percent of those polled said they have lost company financial data sometime in the past 12 months. Similarly, 52 percent lost confidential employee data, 27 percent experienced a breach including customer data and 26 percent were faced with the loss of intellectual property or trade secrets.
Furthermore, similarities in responses indicated that most of the data loss incidents faced by businesses took place when data was in transit between different devices.
While a diverse range of security tools are likely necessary to handle the considerable challenges facing most enterprise IT departments, it is clear that companies are struggling to completely control their endpoints and IT configurations. Investments in mobile device management and CMDB systems can help resolve these issues. MDM helps provide companies with an added layer of control and oversight when it comes to employee smartphones and tablets. The CMDB, on the other hand, provides transparency that is integral for change management and in understanding how various servers and endpoints are connected to each other.