Enterprise Security 3.0

Any IT infrastructure comprises of three basic elements-clients, servers, and

the web. Now figure this-your users are becoming increasingly mobile, and a

significant part of your servers and back-end IT infrastructure is merging with

the web and moving onto the cloud. So the two most critical parts of your IT

setup, viz. clients and servers are moving out of your office, leaving you with

lesser numbers to manage. That should ideally make your job easier, right? After

all, your cloud service provider will take care of all your administrative

headaches. And since your users are mobile, they could work from anywhere,

leaving you with lesser cacophony in the office. Moreover, since all your

applications would anyways be in the cloud, your users would just require a web

browser on their mobile devices to access them. So there would be less endpoint

apps to manage. Before you go into dreamland thinking about how easy life would

become, it's time to do a reality check, because things might be completely the

opposite of this.

With your users going mobile, and a part of your IT

infrastructure moving into the cloud, there's just a balance shift happening. So

while it might ease certain administrative tasks, it would make others more

difficult. The net result doesn't change. In fact, might might make life more

difficult.

Security becomes paramount with such a dramatic change in

your IT infrastructure. In the older architecture, things were under your direct

control, because the clients comprised mostly of desktop PCs and a few laptops,

while the servers were all housed in your own data center. Moving forward,

you'll have to not only worry about security of those inhouse devices, but also

about mobile users and your applications in the cloud. Things could get far

worse, if you're not careful.

For one, more of your users will become mobile in the

future. Currently they have smartphones, netbooks, and laptops, but in the

months to come, you'll find them walking around with a plethora of other mobile

devices. That would increase your security headaches multi-fold, because your

corporate data would now reside on so many mobile devices.

Second, when you move your applications and other

infrastructure to the cloud, you'll face a different set of security issues. For

instance, most cloud computing infrastructure uses shared technologies like

virtualization, which has its own set of security challenges. Plus, when you

move to a public cloud, you share the infrastructure with other people. That

makes the cloud an attractive target for hackers.

We've covered all the security issues related to cloud

computing, virtualization, and social networking in this story.