Context-Rich Systems

 Context-Rich Systems

It’s hard to believe we are in the last quarter of 2014. This has been a tough year for security with household names including Target, Sally Beauty, Neiman Marcus, Michaels, KMart, Dairy Queen and Home Depot all suffering data breaches that exposed their customers’ personal and payment card data. As we all look towards 2015 and our security practices in light of these breaches, Gartner’s recently released top 10 strategic technology trends struck a chord. Two I found particularly relevant to our readers include:

Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection

All roads to the digital future lead through security. However, in a digital business world, security cannot be a roadblock that stops all progress. Organizations will increasingly recognize that it is not possible to provide a 100 percent secured environment. Once organizations acknowledge that, they can begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools. On the technical side, recognition that perimeter defense is inadequate and applications need to take a more active role in security gives rise to a new multifaceted approach. Security-aware application design, dynamic and static application security testing, and runtime application self-protection combined with active context-aware and adaptive access controls are all needed in today’s dangerous digital world. This will lead to new models of building security directly into applications. Perimeters and firewalls are no longer enough; every app needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.

Context-Rich Systems

Ubiquitous embedded intelligence combined with pervasive analytics will drive the development of systems that are alert to their surroundings and able to respond appropriately. Context-aware security is an early application of this new capability, but others will emerge. By understanding the context of a user request, applications can not only adjust their security response but also adjust how information is delivered to the user, greatly simplifying an increasingly complex computing world.

In today’s hacker filled world, context aware security solutions are extremely important as organizations seek to encourage collaboration with employees and non-employees alike, across disparate networks, systems and devices. Solutions that provide sophisticated identity and access management capabilities by looking at users and their context, to dynamically provide secure access to systems, applications and content are necessary to protect your business and most important asset- it’s data.

To add to Gartner’s predicted trend, we also believe that securing the actual content in a collaborative environment offers protection against the less obvious threats – insiders. This approach combines both classification and document level encryption to effectively secure and control content. Using this unique combination of content, context and identify aware security allows you to monitor for all types of content uses across your organization. It offers the most comprehensive approach for secure collaboration.