A 360 degree look at security

Kerry Lewis, General Manager, Security Solutions, Datacraft Asia Ltd.	Ravi Khanchandani, Principal Consultant, Information Technology Services, Cisco Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd
Ananth P., Head - Sales and Marketing, Datacraft India LImited	Sukhjit Singh, Systems Engineer, Enterprise-Sales, Cisco India

Since information security is a boardroom concern in many Indian organisations, it's important to build the security architecture with a collaborative approach. This will ensure that all areas of the information architecture are protected to the optimum.

Keeping with this philosophy, Network Magazine along with Datacraft and Cisco Systems hosted an exclusive seminar titled 'Security 360o' in three Indian cities. The event held on January 18 at Bangalore, January 19 at Delhi, and January 20, 2005 at Mumbai was attended by the leading CIOs, CTOs, and IT Heads of the nation.

The event featured presentations made by industry experts on various aspects of security like the changing paradigms, solutions highlights, user case studies, and real-life experiences.

The seminar halls were packed to capacity with enthusiastic CIOs at the three cities. At the end of the presentations, the audience was treated to live demos of the various security products and solutions that Cisco and Datacraft had to offer.

Intelligent software

According to Kerry Lewis, General Manager, Security Solutions, Datacraft Asia Ltd. "Attacks today are more complicated than before and organisations should now spend more on intelligent software to counter them. We have seen that companies are willing to spend on hardware, but when it comes to software, they are very confused. They should understand that it is the software which will enable their data to be safe."

Lewis added that if security is not everywhere, it is nowhere. Being in business is all about risk. Organisations should make efforts to make their business sound when it comes to risk management. The three things that are absolutely essential for companies to do are to have good credit management, supplier management, and technical assessment.

According to Ananth P, Head - Sales and Marketing, Datacraft India Ltd, "Today there are three primary issues that are gaining momentum among organisations across the country. The first is the regulatory compliance, then there is risk management and finally we should know how to use security as a business enabler."

Self Defending Network

Lalit Sawhney, Vice President, Enterprise Business Unit, Reliance Infocomm	Upal Chakraborty, CIO, Convergys
Pradeep Srinivas, Senior Vice-President, Infrastructure, Caritor	Sanjiv Chaudhary, Sr Project Director, e-Technology Group, IMRB

Ravi Khanchandani, Principal Consultant, Information Technology Services, Cisco Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd. and Sukhjit Singh, Systems Engineer, Enterprise-Sales, Cisco India expressed concern that many organisations today lacked an integrated approach to information security.

They suggested that enterprises should evolve their IT infrastructures to Self Defending Network (SDN) architectures. By doing so, they can insulate their networks from security breaches and find it easy to manage security in future.

Convergence

Sanjiv Chaudhary, Senior Project Director, e-Technology Group, IMRB said, "We are witnessing the true convergence of data, voice, and video, and broadband is also becoming a reality in this country. These prove that IT is booming in the country and organisations today must be able to manage their data effectively. Security plays a vital role in satisfying this objective."