The industry reflects, looks ahead

Chee Heng Loon, vice president, Asia-Pacific, SonicWALL

	Chee Heng Loon, SonicWALL
	Network security and personal data integrity will continue to be a key concern, especially in the Web 2.0 era. More companies will look at security as a process, rather than an appliance, a technology or a certain configuration.

Q. Gartner issued a report warning IT heads to prepare a recession budget. What is your view?
Chee: We shouldn't confuse forecasts of slower IT spending in the United States with the extreme scenario of a total halt in IT development investment. Companies will still need to upgrade their infrastructure and make planned investments to strengthen their businesses. SonicWALL has always been committed to engineering down the costs of creating a secure infrastructure and we believe the current economic environment is likely to work to our advantage.

Name up to three security trends that IT heads should look out for in 2008.
Network security and personal data integrity will continue to be a key concern, especially in the Web 2.0 era. More companies will look at security as a process, rather than an appliance, a technology or a certain configuration. Firewalls, appliances and security solutions need to fit into risk management, rather than risk management being designed to fit into existing solutions.

At SonicWALL, we see three security trends that IT heads should look out for in 2008: Software as a service combined with Web 2.0; de-perimeterization; and network access control and anti-data leakage.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Web 2.0 together are making Web-based applications more comparable to locally hosted "fat client" apps. According to IDC, SaaS is expected to grow from US$9.3 billion today to US$21.4 billion in 2011. Technology is no longer a barrier--service-oriented architecture (SOA) creates a highly distributed, modular infrastructure with Web services standards in place. Networks and bandwidth are ubiquitous, and communities exist to build on SaaS platforms.

In the customer environment, the greater ease of matching demand and supply is bringing about cost reductions, and large software deployments are frustrating, making frequent updates difficult and expensive to manage. Along with the Gen Y coming into workforce and the increased use of consumer technologies in the enterprise, such as blogs, wikis and podcasts, these create new security challenges that are not being addressed by vendors yet.

The "big circle" around the network has been the enterprise security model since the 1990s. Times are changing, and this model is under pressure. Enterprises are shifting to a new architectural philosophy, protecting information clusters as opposed to the entire infrastructure. At SonicWALL, we see a move towards a contextual focus on users. As such, we will see firewalls move to lots of little circles for Web and identity-aware applications.

Moving ahead in 2008

 

 

1.	Socializing goes big in 2008
2.	The urge to merge in 2008
3.	New chips on the block
4.	Web threats dominate security landscape
5.	Battle for the mobile platform space in 2008
6.	The industry reflects, looks ahead

Looking back on 2007

 

 

1.	Looking back at 2007 with envy
2.	Predictions that went right and wrong
3.	2007's movers and shakers

Network access control (NAC)/identity management was not as big (or as simple) as predicted in 2007. However, this might change with NAC integrating transaction security with IAM. The most dangerous users are internal personnel, not outsiders. With an increasingly mobile workforce, vendors need to make IAM relevant to the entire enterprise. IT heads will need an expanded IAM framework which defines the user, the role and the context. Transaction security with anomaly detection is expected to be baked in by 2010.

Social networking sites...
...Are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they can be a serious bandwidth and productivity drain during business hours. On the other hand, knowing what my child is doing on Facebook helps me to know even more about his/her interests and friends. It could be a good way of bridging the generation gap!

Work-life balance is...
... An important HR practice for a company such as SonicWALL as it helps to attract and retain talented staff, especially in today's economy. In fact, the senior management actively encourages the staff to achieve a balance in their work and private lives, and flexi-work schedules are worked out wherever possible to help employees better manage their time.

Such an arrangement is possible, thanks to the use of advanced wireless and mobility technologies that empower our employees with greater flexibility and the freedom to work anytime, anywhere.

More recently, we adopted a "Monday Morning Breakfast Gatherings" where weekly meetings are held but with a twist. Each employee takes turn to buy breakfast for the team on Mondays, and the otherwise stressful session is transformed into a casual gathering where people can get together, interact with each other in a semi-social surrounding and at the same time, have a discussion about work.

In fact, we've added a rating system to rate the breakfast brought in by our co-workers. We think that having a good Monday is essential to a good, smooth start to the work week ahead, just like driving a top performance sports car that is well oiled.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
... Driving down the costs and complexity of IT security solutions. With more businesses leveraging Web 2.0 tools, online advertising and an increasingly mobile workforce, the need for enterprise network traffic inspection continues to grow to protect against more intensive, application layer threats, increasing security processing load and protection requirements. As such, IT departments face the major challenge of driving down the cost and complexity of current network infrastructure options.

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