Outsourced, service-oriented IT needs new security approach

Firms must do separate risk assessments for different parts of their business, according to security experts

A leading security expert has warned that internal threats are likely to be the biggest security concern for IT chiefs over the next six to twelve months, while service oriented architectures (SOAs) may become the focus of attacks in the long-term.

Speaking at the annual Infosecurity event in London, former Microsoft chief security officer Stuart Okin, now with services firm Accenture, told IT Week that most enterprises are moving to more robust security environments to protect against malware and denial of service attacks.

"VoIP is still emerging and it will become a bigger issue, but the focus [for the next year] will be internal attacks [including those] to the partner community," he added.

The popularity of outsourcing and external consultancies and the move to SOAs has made most firms reliant on their business partners, from a business and IT perspective, to deliver their services and products to clients. This has also accelerated the move away from a perimeter approach to securing enterprise networks, Okin explained.

In order to secure this more wide-ranging environment, Accenture is advising its customers to segment off separate parts of their business, conduct risk assessments and implement different security policies in each, according to the level of protection required.

"We're calling this the Next Generation Secure Networking, combining this network segmentation as part of an architecture to support the business drive, and tools such as intrusion prevention systems, 24-by-7 systems monitoring, single-sign-on and strong authentication," he said.

Tony Neate of the serious organised crime agency (Soca) echoed the comments in a keynote speech at the Infosec event, saying that the agency often investigates instances where firms have suffered internal breaches. " Traditional organised crime is compromising employees and contractors… it is happening on a regular basis,” he explained.

Accenture’s Okin added that the major threat to firms in two to five years time will be to their SOA systems. Organised crime units will find they can disrupt firms by targeting SOAs, because the separate application [components] are split between different providers. "Beyond the next 12 months, people will get control of internal threats through education programmes and segmenting their architectures," he said.

"It won't be easy [targeting SOAs]; they will need inside information and to understand the architecture of [individual] companies, but that's where the criminals will get a better payback," Okin explained.

Enterprises will need to ensure that they have business continuity processes, identity and access management and secure networks all in place if they want to mitigate these risks, Okin added.