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Securing the IT infrastructure in today’s computing environment may well be the biggest challenge faced by organizations. Not only must organizations ensure the integrity of their systems and data, but often they must also prove that their security processes and policies measure up against standards and regulations established and enforced by national standards-developing entities. In addition, the recent popularization of virtualized environments adds a new layer of complexity to the security picture. Businesses are just beginning to comprehend the security implications of these environments.
To tackle these security issues, many organizations adopt a security approach that addresses vulnerabilities through security policy and systems designed to protect the integrity of the IT infrastructure. This approach recognizes that the integrity of the IT infrastructure may be easily compromised by malicious attacks from external sources, but often lacks a means of addressing compromises that originate from within the organization through both intentional and inadvertent employee actions. And ironically, the very systems responsible for providing security—the firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and others—often go unmonitored.
Configuration Audit and Control solutions from Tripwire play a critical role in an organization’s security approach, starting with configuration assessment of all systems and devices, including those with the primary function of protecting the computing environment and data. Tripwire software assesses the infrastructure against established, consensus-based security standards, providing a scorecard that security, compliance and IT operations staff can use to get the infrastructure into compliance with security standards—even with virtualized machines as part of the environment. Once the organization achieves a known and trusted state with its computing infrastructure and data, Tripwire helps organizations stay there, with continuous monitoring and alerting for any configuration changes—whether they originate from inside or outside the organization, and whether they represent proper or improper change.
In this paper you’ll learn more about the security risks and vulnerabilities faced by organizations. You’ll also learn about the elements of a proactive security approach. Finally, you’ll learn how Tripwire helps organizations attain and maintain a good security posture using industry-leading configuration assessment and change auditing to harden systems against security breaches, automate compliance with security standards and policies, identify configuration changes, and resolve vulnerabilities.
Environmental Challenges for Security Professionals
Those whose job it is to protect the security of the organization’s IT infrastructure work within an everchanging landscape. Challenges arise from Internet connectivity, e-commerce, a global workplace, virtualized environments, and the ever-increasing complexity of today’s enterprise network. Top that with people who inadvertently introduce risk to the infrastructure and individuals out to cause mischief or trouble, and it’s obvious that security professionals have a big job on their hands. Some of the major challenges security professionals face are discussed below.
Unclear Perimeter
In the past, the line between what is inside versus outside the organization was fairly clear. By connecting to the Internet though, businesses connect to the public networks of the entire world, exposing business infrastructures to the possibility of exploitation by thousands of people in the outside, online, global community. VPNs, extranets, tunneling, and the many technical aspects of e-commerce and the Web make it virtually impossible to support a truly contained network, further blurring the line between what constitutes inside and outside the network.
Integrity Drift
IT must continually contend with integrity drift—the movement of the IT infrastructure away from a known and trusted state. Factors leading to integrity drift include a departure from the homogenous environments common in the past to environments that include a wide diversity of platforms, applications and processes. Mergers and acquisitions also add layers of unanticipated complexity, as does the ongoing pressure by business users to “just get it up and running quickly.”
Virtualized Computing Environments
Virtualization of the computing environment is a more than a passing fad. Virtualization allows organizations to do more with fewer physical machines and to realize tremendous cost-savings if these virtual environments are well managed. However, virtualized machines introduce numerous possibilities for security compromise. They increase the number of entry points and connections for attackers to zero in on per physical machine, and virtual machines can easily be brought online and offline in a short timeframe with little or no oversight from IT.
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