Protecting the Four Pillars: Physical, Data, Process, and Architecture
Software solutions are certainly part of the story, but they only make up one leg of the table, and a security platform built on a single leg isn’t sufficient to prevent the cyberattacks foisted by today’s digital criminals. To fully secure communications networks, services and devices, the four pillars of security must be addressed in a dynamic fashion:
- physical: access to facilities and data centers;
- data: access, copying, reading, and manipulation rights for specific data sets;
- process: the ability to hijack processes;
- architectural: the way in which processes are structured (metadata, etc.).
Let’s get physical
When I worked at an electronics factory in college, the floor supervisor had a saying: “Locks keep people honest.”
Physical security is the first and foremost challenge for communications service providers (CSPs). It includes the obvious elements, like prohibiting unauthorized access to facilities with locks, key cards and biometric verification, as well as tight security protocols for physical devices such as desktop and laptop computers and storage drives. Facilities themselves need to be engineered to withstand disasters, whether natural or man-made, thus preventing interruptions in power or facilities overheating from creating attack surfaces. Physical security also extends to all network elements, including macro- and microcell sites, M2M (machine-to-machine communications) devices and even smartphones.
One of the coolest technological developments of recent years is also the cause of some of the biggest security challenges: the cloud. On-premise deployments are relatively straightforward , but what kind of visibility into physical-security parameters do cloud clients have? HP, IBM, Citrix, SafeNet, and Symantec offer cloud-security solutions that can provide the necessary visibility.
