Security Approaches Day Zero

Protecting applications from new virus attacks will be a major issue for enterprises during the coming year, according to attendees at this year's Networld+Interop tradeshow in Las Vegas.

IT managers are really paranoid about security and not many of them want to go on the record about it. But we talked to a few who were willing to speak under condition of anonymity.

One IT manager working in the healthcare industry said securing applications is "very much" a problem for users at the moment.

Another beleaguered IT manager agreed, saying: "I see [application security] as probably the most pending concern in our company – we've got the firewall and intrusion and detection systems figured out, but the application layer is hard to keep up with."

Another message coming out of N+I was that, if you build applications in-house, you will have to work extra hard to protect them. Kurt Roemer, director of security research at vendor NetContinuum Inc., sums up the dilemma. "Who writes patches for your customized applications?" he asks.