A Golden Age of Security Innovation

These are frustrating times when it comes to security. It seems as though with each passing day the bad guys get more brazen. In fact, almost every day brings word of yet another security breach. And those are only the ones that get reported.

But while there’s a lot to be pessimistic about when it comes to security, IT innovation generally abhors a vacuum. A big part of the problem with security today is that most of the investments customers have made are generally limited to firewalls and antivirus software. Those technologies are critical, but the attacks routinely being launched these days are sophisticated enough to get around those defenses. There are, of course, a great number of other security technologies that should be deployed as part of a layered security defense strategy, but many of those technologies traditionally have either been too expensive for some organizations to justify or just plain too difficult to implement.

But with the coming of 2012, Jim Pflaging, director and managing principal for The Security Innovation (SINET) Group, an organization dedicated to advancing the adoption of innovative security technologies by promoting collaboration between the public and private sectors, says we’re about to witness a wave of new security innovations, many of which will be aimed at pressing issues such as mobile or cloud security. Other innovative solutions will be aimed specifically at helping companies defend their intellectual property, which Pflaging says is increasingly being targeted as part of international corporate espionage that now permeates cyberspace. Looking ahead at 2012, Pflaging says it’s clear the shift toward unified communications across IP networks is going to create yet another layer of computing that will need to be secured.

IT organizations in this day and age need to establish a minimum level of hygiene of security that goes beyond existing legacy technologies, he says. The challenge, he adds, will be in finding ways of making those technologies affordable enough to acquire and easy enough to deploy.

Obviously, this all spells opportunity for security vendors, which if Pflaging is right, should soon lead to a coming golden age of security innovation starting with the beginning of 2012.