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E-BUSINESS INTENSIFIES SECURITY REQUIREMENTS.

In today’s marketplace, businesses must transform to e-businesses to remain competitive. Analysts predict that companies that don’t make the necessary changes will be overrun by competition and ultimately fail. As enterprises around the world undergo transformations, they are leveraging Internet technologies to: broaden their markets by extending their reach globally; enter new business areas through collaborations or expanded services made possible with Web-based interactions; increase employee productivity by providing easier access to corporate information and services; reduce costs through improved operations that integrate Web access and traditional information technology (IT) systems.

Increasingly, companies realize the significant business value of developing and deploying enterprise-wide security to the rapid growth of e-business. To deliver high availability and easy manageability, they must consider security requirements as an important part of their e-business transformation.

IT organizations can no longer view security as a burden. Security policies must become an integral part of IT as businesses continue to expose themselves and collaborate with key partners, customers and employees. To benefit from Web-based technologies running in a secure, connected environment, many companies adopt various proprietary technologies and install point products from multiple vendors.

The type of computing environment can cause four major problems:

I. Lack of integrated security products drives complexity.

One of the reasons that security can be so complex is the large number of products required to protect an enterprise.

II. Security policy is difficult to implement.

Many security breaches are a result of a lack of policy or an inability to implement policy. Implementing even a simple policy creates an enormous amount of work. For example, providing an external sales group with user access to an online forecasting application on the last Friday of each month requires the administrator to configure the following: an access control program to authorize application access; a firewall to authorize network access; one or more authentication schemes to identify users; an anti-virus application to protect the application and network; an intrusion detection product to protect against unauthorized access to valuable resources.

III. Security costs are escalating.

Security costs can quickly get out of hand – not only from the purchase of numerous products but from the considerable resources necessary to install, configure and integrate them into a cohesive security infrastructure.

Ultimately, piecemeal solutions can become quite unwieldy to manage, often requiring companies to employ multiple security experts to maintain the different programs.

Eventually the cost of implementation and integration can become more expensive than the products themselves.

IV. Security issues inhibit e-business application deployment.

Today’s security systems are intrusive. Companies must either buy applications with embedded security or write security code into their applications; both choices can delay or inhibit e-business deployment. Custom applications require writing unique security code, necessitating additional programming skill and time for each new application.

All of these factors can delay deployment and contribute to the increasing total cost of implementing a comprehensive security solution.

Дата добавления: 2015-03-29