The Dark Side of the Frictionless Enterprise
During the seventy-year history of enterprise information technology, generation after generation of IT have transformed the nature of business. No process, no customer, no aspect of day-to-day work has been left unchanged, as the exponential pace of technology advancement continues unabated.
Today it seems we’ve reached an inflection point in this inexorable march of progress, as so many facets of technology are impacting organizations, from cloud computing to mobile technologies to big data.
Furthermore, these technology advancements are removing impediments to business, as customers demand increasingly real-time, always-on service from the companies they do business with.
Welcome to the frictionless enterprise.
Applications and data networks have changed. Applications can be shared anywhere, on a range of new and diverse devices. External partners, customers and employees need to access mission-critical data rapidly and efficiently.
In addition, companies no longer stand alone. Instead, ecosystems become the central organizational principle, as enterprises offload responsibilities to partners, customers, and other participants in the value chain.
Yet with all these advances come greater risks. The insular, proprietary network and application technologies of the last century may have been inflexible and expensive to maintain, but at least they provided a measure of protection from criminals and other bad actors. Every step we take toward the frictionless enterprise opens up holes for hackers to exploit.
Sharing applications across borders also means exposing them to hackers. Every time an organization places an application on the network, its attack surface grows wider and harder to defend.
As recent high-profile cybersecurity breaches have shown, the old way of securing systems and the precious data on them is not enough. Hackers are compromising global business, turning corporate IT environments into targets ripe for attack – stealing valuable data at will.
As these global IT attacks become increasingly commonplace, executives must ask themselves: are they adequately protecting corporate data, from credit cards to patient records to bank accounts to social security numbers – as well as other sensitive information flowing freely across the enterprise?
There are security tools aplenty, and cybersecurity is a booming business to be sure. But the attacks continue unabated. Something has got to give. Bottom line: we all need a better, simpler way to protect the information lifeblood of our organizations.
Read the entire white paper at http://certesnetworks.com/go/securing-the-frictionless-enterprise/.
Certes Networks is an Intellyx client. Intellyx retains full editorial control over the content of this paper.
Save the Date
Join the upcoming live webcast as Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx and contributor to Forbes, and Satyam Tyagi, CTO of Certes Networks, explore securing the frictionless enterprise on September 24th at 11 a.m. EDT.
