The Issue:

The challenge today is that IT is accelerating, putting the CSO
between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand he or she must uphold
corporate policies and manage security and compliance. On the other
hand, the CSO cannot be seen as business prevention; security cannot be
the big red stop button on the IT assembly line. Simultaneous with IT
acceleration, an evolution is occurring in the security realm, defined
by unified threat management (UTM). Sitting at the confluence of
security and networking, UTM is evolving from a simple consolidation
value proposition to a ubiquitous solution that holds the potential to
provide the CSO with the tools to meet the corporate risk tolerance
while fully supporting the agility goals of the business.

Threat Management Must Evolve

From Nemertes’ conversations with IT executives, we know that
security can be both business enablement and business prevention. For
example, two-thirds of organizations that participated in Nemertes’
Security and Information Protection (Sec-IP) benchmark have avoided a
new technology because of security concerns. Our research also
indicates that CSOs are mostly successful in implementing security:
nearly 95% of participants in Security and Information Protection
(Sec-IP) consider their security efforts successful. (Please see Figure
1: Rating of Security Success, Page 2). Yet at the same time, nearly
35% of participants have had a security breach in the past year. This
tells us that security, and threat management in particular, still
leaves much room for improvement.

Read this Issue Paper:

Clients: Defining the “U” in UTM: Unified, Ubiquitous or Useless?

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