Trend Surfing

In security, as in anything else, trends come and go. Some hang around for the long haul, some get superseded, and still others just get laughed at in hindsight. From identity management, endpoint compliance, de-perimeterization, and dozens of other buzz-word compliant trends that have ebbed and flowed over the years, we've learned a lot as an industry. Like the fact that any vendor can and will apply their product to whatever the current trend is. Or, probably more important, that behind most trends there's a kernel of useful knowledge and functionality to be gained.

Looking at the trend of data-centric security, it's easy to see the motivators; compliance regulations, data breach notification laws and booming cybercrime combined with sloppy security programs, IT departments rushing out infrastructure and systems without fully understanding the security implications of what data is going where, and habits from an analog world that just don't work in a digital age. But what will be the lessons we'll all have learned in five years? What collective wisdom will we have gained?

Hopefully, as this immersion center grows and we explore the topic of data privacy, we can start to get a handle on what really matters. Not only by examining the issues and root causes that are driving us increasingly toward focusing on the data first and the technology second, but also looking at specific techniques, products, and methodologies we can use to get business done securely.

There's a lot of ways to slice the issue of data privacy. Some of the topics we'll be exploring in this immersion center and blog are database extrusion prevention products, encryption, enterprise entitlement (so-called enterprise DRM), network and host-based content filtering, and the role centralized management software can play. That's certainly not an exhaustive list, as there's a lot that goes on in restructuring security infrastructure and policies to focus on protecting data.

One way or another, pretty much all security issues can be data privacy issues. Hopefully you'll stick around and we can sort it out.