“One of the fundamental questions that every organization is
presented with on a day-to-day basis is, “Is my data safe?” It’s a
really good question because the consequences of not knowing can be
detrimental to your company. I hate the term, but the e-Commerce
community is built on the integrity of its data, yet very few
companies employ technologies that can directly answer the
question.”
“Most companies feel that they get “security” by putting a
firewall in front of their web and mail servers. This really
provides a false sense of security. “I closed the door to the
house, therefore I have “security.” We need to begin thinking
of security as a process rather than an event. We will never have
100% security, so what do we do?“
“First of all we need to flop the entire security “model” upside
down. I do agree that you should have a firewall in place. This
keeps most of the “script kiddies” out, and can help protect your
systems from some Denial of Service attacks. There is one major
limitation of a firewall; it won’t tell you if someone got through.
So why not start with what you are trying to protect in the first
place, the data. One of my favorite phrases is: “If you’re trying
to protect bad data, you’re wasting your time.” We should start
with protecting the data and the systems where that data lives.
This is called data integrity. Data integrity is a technology that
will answer the question, “Is my data safe?”