As security becomes increasingly important, many manufacturers have created security teams to take charge of protecting information and preventing attacks. This is a recent development that shows an increased awareness among manufacturers of the financial dangers of system attacks. “Security teams didn’t exist five years ago. They do today,” says Jeff Platon, senior director of product and technology marketing for security at San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems Inc. “A security team builds a rules set and pushes it to the IT (information technology) operations team for deployment; then they monitor it on the backend.”
According to Platon, a growing number of manufacturers, such as General Motors, have decided that IT is actually a core competence, which means information management has been elevated from a mere utility to precious competitive knowledge. In response to the growing importance of security, some companies have taken the responsibility of security from the network builders and created security teams that exist independently of the IT group. “As firewalls have become more and more mature, they’ve blurred the line between a network organization and a security organization,” says Chris Calvert, manager of security intelligence at IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y. “Responsibility is divided up between network and security.”
Manufacturers have also thrown firewalls at every potential soft spot, creating an incomprehensible patchwork of plugs and stitches. “I can’t image a corporation that doesn’t have a whole host of firewalls,” says Al Decker, executive vice president of security and privacy services at Electronic Data Systems Corp. in Plano, Texas. Sometimes the effort gets out of control. “One large international organization has employed 4,000 firewalls. We brought it down to 1,500,” says Decker. “It may appear that 4,000 firewalls is the ultimate protection, but without a strategy, you don’t know what’s left unprotected.”
See the story that goes with this sidebar: Firewalls: Fighting the barbarians at the gate
