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The State of Security 2000
October 4, 1999 |
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Executive Summary Enterprise Security We asked a team of real- world experts to assess the big six of security: virtual private networks, public key infrastructure, firewalls, intrusion-detection software, vulnerability-assessment software and antivirus software. Our goal was to provide useful information on how you should spend your security dollars. As part of our assessment, we ranked each technology on a scale of one to five using five criteria: suitability to task, impact on the enterprise, maturity, manageability and scalability. You won't find many surprises in our assessments, and when it comes to security, that's a good thing. We found that VPN technology is maturing quickly though a few gnarly interoperability issues remain. PKI is lagging: Only a few sites with deep pockets are buying in, and this probably won't change until 2001 or so. Firewalls are evolving quickly, but avoid products that add other security technologies for now. Vulnerability-assessment software is a good investment but make sure you have all your other security needs taken care of first. Intrusion-detection software is still mostly hype, while antivirus software is mostly excellent. But beware of the evolving tricks of hackers. Right now, antivirus software on the server side can't control users' activation of harmful programs. That's a hole that will become more dangerous as hackers get smarter. And hackers are always getting smarter.
Our recommendation is to implement the most mature technologies immediately. For instance, intrusion-detection software can wait. And don't write off PKI completely. Once the interoperability issues are resolved, this technology will take off fast.
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