The future of information security is now

The information security industry is one of the very few that hasn’t been severely impacted by the economic downturn. Many companies in this sector have thrived in the past 12 months. If you’re in this line of work, you know why that is – the bad guys are working even harder and the enterprises can’t afford to tighten the security budget without immediate consequences.

At the RSA Conference Europe 2009 this morning in London, Art Coviello, President of RSA, opened with a keynote that put into the spotlight some of the issues we are going to face in the near future. As information security goes, good news are far and in between, and as new megatrends that are fueled by technology get into our lives, things are going to get even worse.

The scope of the problem we will face is easy illustrated with numbers. By 2015 there will be 15 billion devices communicating over the Internet and this will include rising fragmented workforces and a sea of mobile workers using social networking and collaborative technologies to do their work. With all the security troubles both organizations and end users are experiencing right now, you can only imagine how many threats will emerge in the next few years.

Executive Chris Young continued Mr. Coviello’s discussion by emphasizing the problem at hand: How are we going to secure tomorrow’s infrastructures if we’re struggling with what we have at the moment? Trying to prevent the use of attractive technologies is a sure way to make security professionals irrelevant. Naturally, we also can’t ignore the risks.

There are clear benefits to using new technologies and in order to achieve better and more effective security, it must be embedded into the infrastructure. No single vendor or product is going to solve a common set of problems but the message is that it’s imperative to build an architecture that contains everything an organization needs in order to stay as secure as possible.

This was surely not a thought-provoking keynote, but it was quite an appropriate start for a conference that will bring a myriad of hot topics during these three days.

Help Net Security photos from the RSA Conference Europe 2009 keynote sessions are available over here.