In 2006, about 36 per cent of mid-sized businesses in Canada faced a security breach because of the loss of a portable or desktop computer. Today’s reactive security posture simply isn’t adequate to address the onslaught of information security threats.
“It’s difficult to maintain a consistent high level of security in the current enterprise,” says James Quin, senior research analyst, Info-Tech Research Group, in IT World Canada’s exclusive Webinar, Security Threats and Solutions, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard (Canada) Co. and Intel Corp. “There are just too many threats, they come from too many different angles, and it makes it difficult to stay on top of things.”
The one-hour Webinar is now available online. The session, moderated by IT World Canada vice-president and community advocate John Pickett, also features Darren Leroux, category business manager of commercial notebooks with HP Canada, and Dennis Morgan, senior security specialist with Intel, in a discussion of the new posture of adaptive security, and how vendors are coming to meet the threat head-on.
One critical flaw in today’s security paradigm is that the end-user platform is fraught with security gaps – between the hardware and the operating system, between the operating system and the applications, even between security point solutions like firewall and antivirus that don’t integrate seamlessly. Another is that we depend on end-users for too much security administration. “We didn’t hire the end-users to be security experts,” Quin says. “What we hired them for is to be expert programmers, expert developers, expert project managers.” Quin outlines how desktop virtualization and other technologies can be used to create a centrally administered security stance that monitors all processes on the end-user machine without user intervention.
The top three security issues, says Leroux, are electronic attacks (53 per cent), hard drive failure (40 per cent) and the loss of portable or desktop PCs (35 per cent). “Organizations must move from reactive to proactive and cost-effective information protection and control,” Leroux says. In this Webinar, Leroux delves into the technologies like biometric pre-OS authentication, full volume drive encryption, RAID (redundant array of independent disks) and self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (SMART) that PC makers are using to address these vulnerabilities.
Changing usage models – increased collaboration, seamless connectivity, the blurring of the line between home and work and data mobility – increase employee productivity, says Intel’s Morgan. But they also leave the enterprise vulnerable to today’s evolving, often profit-driven, attacks. Morgan outlines how Intel vPro technology, in concert with third-party applications, offers strengthened endpoint security, intrusion protection, isolation and recovery.
WATCH THE ONE-HOUR WEBINAR TODAY