The Endpoint Imperative: The Perimeter is Dead; Long Live the Perimeter!

Cloud, mobility and the Internet of Things have obliterated the traditional perimeter that protected organizations. The result: Higher productivity, but bigger challenges for security, data protection, and mobile device management.

This episode of the “The Endpoint Imperative” podcast series from Intel, Kevin L. Jackson and Intel’s Yasser Rasheed explore the new normal for security, with a focus on the end users.

Kevin: The topic for this episode is,”The Perimeter is Dead, Long Live the Perimeter”. With me is Yasser Rasheed Director of Business Client Security with Intel. Yasser welcome back.

Yasser: Hi Kevin, happy to be back.

Kevin: This time, however, I’d like to really talk to you about this security perimeter thing. Cloud mobility and the internet things have really obliterated what I’ve always referred to as the wall and moat security paradigm, where working inside the enterprise was safe but working outside of the company’s walls wasn’t. What’s pending impact of this evolution?

Yasser: You know Kevin nowadays with the cloud and mobility trends, we as end users we take our devices and work anywhere and everywhere at anytime. We take our laptops and work from home or from a coffee shop or on the go during the trip. The new shift here is really making us re-think how we protect the information that we have access to. The concept or the traditional concept of protecting at the perimeter with the traditional firewalls and gateways is really non-existent anymore. When I’m using my laptop at a coffee shop, I am no longer going through a firewall to access a cloud service. It’s imperative for the industry to re-think the concept of listening at the perimeter level from a security perspective.

Kevin: Did the IT team miss the boat with getting a grip on the management of security within this new business ecosystem of today?

Yasser: From my perspective, it’s not about missing the boat as much as the industry is moving and evolving very fast and IT organizations, more specifically information security organizations, need to cope with this evolution, and in certain cases may need to be ahead of it. At the same time, by the same token, that evolution is giving an advantage to the hacker community, to the bad guys really, to take advantage of the shift and attack the endpoints. Attack the end users, grab the data, steal the data or lock it in and ask for ransom.

Kevin: These new approaches to information technology have really changed the traditional workplace. Yasser how are IT leaders balancing the benefits of cloud and mobility, things like productivity and accessibility, with the obvious security challenges?

Yasser: Great question Kevin. We know that end users especially the new generations of end users focus tremendously on the ease of use and the productivity, and don’t want to be burdened with additional security processes that they don’t really comprehend. It’s imperative for the IT leaders and information security leaders to balance end-user productivity, the simplicity of integration for IT and the productivity end-user experience for end users. The only way for the industry to evolve and achieve the right level of protection is with the right balance. This is not an easy job to do, however, it’s the only way for the industry to keep moving in this direction.

Kevin: Do you have any advice on how to make security everybody’s job in this new normal?

Yasser: Great question. The first thing I advise everyone is for the leaders in the IT and information security industry to educate their teams and their end users. Education is king. We need to first educate them and get them to the level of comfort with the simple attacks like phishing and how scams happen. More importantly, IT organizations and information security organizations need to focus on four priorities. The top one is identity protection. That is really protecting against identity breaches which today constitute 80% or more of the total number of breaches. The second priority is to protect the data. Data protection is really an imperative because the data is the asset that the attackers are going after. The third priority is about detecting and preventing threats, especially the new and advanced threats that we see nowadays where signature-based detection of viruses is no longer sufficient, it’s necessary but insufficient. The fourth and last priority is the ability to recover quickly from an event of a breach. The breach is a matter of when it happens, not if it happens, and organizations need to be ready recover quickly to a good level of productivity. These are the four priorities that I recommend the industry to focus on, and more importantly, apply the new techniques based on hardware-based security as opposed to traditional software-based security that is no longer sufficient in this space.

Kevin: With that sound advice we’ve come to the end of our time for this episode. We really want to thank Yasser Rasheed with Intel for his insights and expertise.

Yasser: Thank you, Kevin, it was a pleasure to be here.

( This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.)

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