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It's becoming increasingly clear that the current model for network security -- defend the perimeter and patch, patch, patch -- has some serious shortcomings.
First, relying on signature files and patches doesn't provide the absolute protection that some vendors promise. Even if your perimeter systems are fully up to date, new attacks that signature files don't recognize will still get through. That was the case in January 2003 when the Slammer worm struck, spreading so quickly around the world that it slipped right past signature-based defenses and reached most vulnerable hosts within 18 minutes.
Fast worms such as Slammer and new blended attacks that combine worms and viruses will likely become more common this year. Because only their authors know what forms these attacks will take, IT teams have no way of blocking them with signature files. For all the investment being made in perimeter defenses, enterprise networks remain vulnerable.
Second, this maintenance-heavy approach to network security is expensive -- too expensive. A recent study by The Yankee Group found that the largest area of enterprise IT spending, 25%, is allocated to staffing costs. Why are IT organizations spending so much on staffing? In part, because today's security model is so labor-intensive. IT organizations need staffers for a growing list of low-level security tasks, such as reading the latest pile of security bulletins, tracking down patches, reprogramming firewalls and so on. When you consider that all this security work still leaves networks vulnerable to fast worms and blended attacks, perhaps it's time to put down the patch CDs, sit back and rethink our approach to network security.
For enterprises today, the network is where business takes place. Every department in an organization relies on the network for applications and for a growing share of communications, not only e-mail and instant messaging, but soon telephony as well. The mission of network security is to ensure that applications can do their jobs and that applications have the network bandwidth and the availability needed to support the operations of the company.
There's also a broader perspective on network requirements. It's a holistic view that encompasses security as well as availability, bandwidth and control. We call it network integrity. This is the real goal behind securing a network. When the network is functioning properly, providing applications with the bandwidth and availability they need, then the network has integrity, and security is doing its job, even when the network is under attack.
Instead of investing primarily at the perimeter, network managers would do well to adopt this broader approach, recognizing the unique vulnerabilities and requirements of each area of the network and deploying a layered security architecture designed to coordinate network operations overall and achieve network integrity.
The Yankee Group recommends that enterprises make network integrity an essential element of their application security architectures and invest in these four layers:
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