Peterborough IT Security Experts
Is your IT Security ready for 2012?
As the person responsible for the 1st Software as a Service (SaaS) in The Print and Publishing industry, As have learned early on the importance of the IT Security within the IT Infrastrucure design. During this transition period, a management decision was also taken to deploy the 1st infrastructure as a Service platform (IaaS) for the above industry, and both projects were a success. Because we transitioned from a traditional to a cloud computing based IT infrastructure. One of the key factors to this success is the fact we put the IT security at the top of our agenda.
Why do you need IT Security Experts?
In IT infrastructure design, it is very easy to put the security of your infrastructure aside and just concentrate on the scalability, availability, performance manageability and efficiency, which the visible part of any IT infrastructure design. However, being also the IT Security officer of the company, I felt it was my duty to secure the network by isolating the backbone or core of the network from the service providers’ edge network and our own enterprise edge network. The result was a very complex, but secure network design.
Today, the level of IT security attacks on the Internet is far more sophisticated than 3 years ago. Albeit this is not 100% true, because during the same period, I lead my team to create this new virtualised platform, there was one of the most sophisticated attacks on the internet, directed toward Juniper Network, Adobe Systems, and Rackspace just to name these few companies. This operation was called Aurora and was orchestrated from China. The complexity and malware binaries used for this attack was never seen before.
Today with the arrival of Advanced Persitent threats (APT) where attackers are using “Poison Ivy” Remote access Trojan (RAT) or other advanced malware tools, a small or medium company with medium-security expertise, does not stand a chance against these threats.These programs will sniff out all your confidential data without your knowlege and you will never know that their security has been compromised and that all their Intellectual Properties (IP) have been stolen. In general, most small and medium companies do not complete an IT Security audit, even if they just introduced a brand-new network, this will not be a priority for the business. However, with these new threats and the introduction of the mobile anywhere enabled devices. Small and medium company needs to review their IT Security strategy.
IT security solution for small and medium business.
There one solution that can help the small and medium companies against these threats: The introduction of Cloud Network Services (CNS) within these companies IT infrastructure Designs. The idea is very simple. A business will isolate areas of the network or contents of the network that cannot be trusted to a Cloud Network Services Provider. The fact that most Cloud Network Service (CNS) providers have in-house expertise to deal with Services like disaster recovery,security,collaboration applications, management,and optimization. They will be able to put in place measures that will protect this new part of the network which is not trusted to. Therefore, allow small businesses to move the treat away from their local infrastructure.
This simple solution is ideal for the companies that are not very comfortable with the complexity of their IT infrastructure. In a recent IT security project, one of our customers who we can name for the obvious reasons told us that his network could not be breached because it is solid and reliable architecture and has all security measures to protect them. We gave them a challenge to allow us to demonstrate how with a mobile device, we could not only comprise their security, but also have access to important files in their corporation. As you would guess it tool us 5 hours to have access and download important document without the knowledge of their IT operation team. Only one thing we can say any network made by human can be breached by other humans, it is just a matter of time.
The last thing we want to touch upon on this article is the fact that many customers are looking at the use of public cloud. However, our advice is better to go for Private cloud computing rather than Public cloud computing (PCC). Because the level of complexity of security attacks, we feel it is our duty to advise people to focus on what is the most important aspect of their companies: their assets and reputation, just for this reason it is better to pay a little more. Again, this is an impartial advice where we are not recommending any provider. This is just a matter of years of experience Designing Secure IT Infrastructure, iTOTALMarketing can help your business on the following security topic:
- Security Penetration Tests
- Secure Infrastructure Design
- IT Security Audit
- Malware Protection
- Managed Firewalls
- IT Security Perimeter Hardening
- IT Security Solutions Consultancy
- Wireless Security