Virtual defence on its way

Trend Micro states that security virtualisation and data leakage prevention will be some of the biggest enterprise security trends in the near future.

Enterprise security will move along the path to increased virtualisation and firms in the future will need to move to more virtual or software-based security appliances.

According to Raimund Genes, CTO of security firm Trend Micro, this move to virtualisation is one of the bigger trends in enterprise security that is coming our way.

 

"Trend Micro's customer base has told us that they are tired of appliances. In the short term an appliance looks nice, but over a three year period, it comes with a heavy price tag for the customer.

This is very nice for the security industry which sells the systems, but definitely not nice for the customers," says Genes.

High end enterprises, with 500 users or more, will prove to be more open to virtualisation technologies in general and security in particular and will be the early adopter of virtual security appliances.

"Trend Micro will release, for beta, special virtual appliances in the second quarter of this year. Definitely by the third quarter these will be available in the market. Over time we will replace our hardware appliances with virtual and software appliances.

There will be a product line running on VMWare and another product line will be software appliances, which will be delivered with a hardened RedHat kernel," says Genes.

While Trend Micro will continue to service customers who buy hardware appliances, they will not add any new features to the hardware line, Genes states.

Apart from virtual appliances, HTTP scanning and data leakage prevention (DLP) will be the bigger trends affecting enterprise security in the future, he continues.

"DLP will initially prove to be an organisational challenge because at first you would need to figure out the status or category of different documents - what is internal and what can be shared. Most companies which want to implement DLP have not figured this out yet.

You have to do groundwork in the company before you even consider a technical solution.

You cannot solve this with technology alone. This is why DLP is not something that will be adopted widely this year," says Genes.

Genes also urges Middle East enterprises to consider security as a priority and work on it in the initial stages of setting up the infrastructure to ensure they can effectively face the evolving threat landscape.

"Enterprises in this region are interested in security but it is not the main focus. The main focus is to get the systems up and running and security comes in as a second step. Companies should design security so that it is part of the whole and does not come as a second step.

If they think of security afterwards you might need to change your infrastructure.

This takes more time, costs more and might not be as secure as it would be if security design had been done in the beginning," says Genes.

The company fell victim to a recent hacking attack on global sites and had to temporarily take down some of its web pages.

According to Genes, not a single user was affected by the attack on the website. He also states that there can be no such thing as 100% security and that Trend Micro reacted the right away by closing down pages and making public the fact that they had been hacked.