Systems can be secure, if you're willing to pay the price
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 7:00:00 AM
The technology is available for corporations to protect themselves from viruses, hackers, and other threats to their IT networks. The problem is most companies don't have—or won't commit—the resources necessary to put the proper technology in place.
That's the opinion of Robert Norton, executive VP and COO of StrategIT, a Westwood, Mass.-based IT consulting firm. "We know that corporations have been cutting IT budgets," Norton says. "And it's difficult to implement the types of defenses that are required to make you bulletproof in that environment."
Budgets aside, Norton says many companies ignore simple measures that could protect their networks. In fact, he contends that most corporations that suffered downtime from the recent Slammer virus did so because they didn't install a Microsoft-issued patch, although he understands why some companies were in that position.
"Sometimes custom programming can be altered by these patches, which means that to install them properly requires a special test environment. It can be a major challenge to come up with the cash to set up a separate set of computers and then find the time to run the tests."
Norton says getting an accurate reading of your IT security needs requires assessing your current defenses through things such as penetration testing and social engineering. Penetration testing is having someone attempt to hack into your network to expose vulnerabilities; an example of social engineering would be having someone call your employees and attempt to talk them out of their passwords.
These experiments can lead to things like building extra partitions to seal off parts of your network from attack, or instituting rigid procedures for issuing and managing passwords. "Assuming that you're safe because you have a firewall in front of your Web site is an unsafe assumption," Norton says. "You have to look at security in multilayer fashion. It's like locking your car doors, and then turning on the alarm system."
Norton concedes this approach can be expensive, but he also argues that even a short amount of network downtime could be fatal for a business in a sector as competitive as manufacturing.
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