Preparation is the biggest hurdle

The Olympic Games will put the UK at risk and businesses must be ready, warns David Hobson

We will soon be the target for major attacks. The Olympic Games is one of the largest global events staged by any individual country yet, and unfortunately, the headlines often have little to do with the athletes’ performance on the field.

The protests surrounding the torch on its journey through the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco have highlighted some very serious security issues we will face in the run up to, and during, 2012.

Once the UK steps into the limelight, with the baton passed to London during the closing ceremony at this year’s event, the focus will be redirected and we will become the next major target of attacks driven by political and religious beliefs. These attacks are more than likely to be both physical and digital and will, undoubtedly, be a smokescreen for organised crime to hide behind.

The security community faces a huge challenge of educating organisations about the threats to their business.

As the dependence on IT continues to grow, so does the realisation of how much sensitive or critical information is held in IT environments. As more sensitive data is digitised, and regulatory requirements are increasingly stringent, organisations face the challenge of securing and protecting their data against unauthorised access, tampering and loss.

An enterprise’s network is inherently complex including all sorts of devices, platforms,
applications and operating systems. Increased employee mobility and the growing number of network-capable devices means that tracking and controlling network access has become essential to maintaining data security in corporate networks. Organisations must balance access to these resources, while protecting valuable assets and ensuring customers’ privacy.

The sheer number of threats and intrusions to corporate IT systems has grown phenomenally in the past few years and today’s security risks are complex. Organisations face both external and
internal threats as well as passive threats.

Networks and personal computers need to be protected from vandals, viruses, data exposure and inappropriate content. To better deal with the rapidly evolving threats, organisations are moving towards combining proactive and reactive security measures both in the existing network and at the boundaries where the network may interface with external and unknown devices. Historically associated with protecting a network against attack from the internet, firewalls are increasingly important for securing a network against internal threats.

So where to start? Even thinking about dealing with the number of security issues that an organisation faces is enough to cause a migraine. Finding and prioritising the sheer volume of the network’s vulnerabilities, then ensuring that they are fixed, is a nearly impossible task that can leave an organisation exposed.

Implementing vulnerability management to discover and assess vulnerabilities, and to implement and maintain system configurations, will ensure secure environments, saving time and money in the long run. The threat to business is increasing as we rely on the data in an organisation. The good news is that UK plc finally seems to be waking up to the threat. The information we have suggests that, after many high-profile data losses, boardrooms are finally giving security a bigger piece of their IT budget.

Is this because no chief executive wants to see themselves on the front page of the nationals and have to explain to their shareholders how they lost all their customer data? Or is it because the threats are finally being given proper airtime?

Either way, one of the issues the security industry faces is that if it does its job well, it will never be able to prove that the money was well invested because incidents have been prevented before they happened.

We need finance directors to recognise the real benefits from an investment in security that is necessary not only for today but to protect us into the future.

As a result of this outlay, when they see fewer breaches, that should be recognised as money well spent instead of money down the drain. The threats will be growing rapidly in number with UK plc becoming a major target in the run up to 2012. There is no time to be wasted.

London’s Olympics will be hugely reported on and will subsequently be remembered in history, let us just hope it is for the right reasons.