Stories by: Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Failing an audit sounds like the last thing any company wants to happen. But that's because audits are seen by many as the goal of a security program. In reality, audits are only the means of testing whether enforcement of security matches the policies. In the broader context, though, an audit is a means to avoid a breach by learning the lesson in a "friendly" exercise rather than in the real world. If the audit is a stress-test of your environment that helps you find the weaknesses before a real attack, you should be failing audit every now and then. After all, if you're not failing any audits there are two possible explanations:

For years, Facebook users have been clamoring for better privacy controls and clarity, while Facebook engineers oscillate between improvements and major privacy snafus. Every now and then a new wave of exasperated users cry out "That's it, I'm leaving". Up to now, users really didn't have anywhere to go after quitting, so they effectively quit the social media scene, self-ostracized (MySpace is equivalent to being exiled, perhaps worse). Now that they have somewhere else to go (Google+), Facebook is ramping up its privacy controls and seems to be taking privacy more seriously. Let the privacy competition begin!

For two decades, the dominant security model has been location-centric. We instinctively trust insiders and distrust outsiders, so we build security to reflect that: a hard perimeter surrounding a soft inside. The model works best when there's only one connection to the outside, offering a natural choke point for firewall defense.

In previous columns I have repeatedly emphasized the importance of interoperability and the danger of security fragmentation. Security is so fragmented that it is often hard to discern between hype and reality. Large security vendors try to draw you into a single-vendor closed integration package. Small vendors try to sell you the latest magic bullet, presenting what should be a feature as a whole new industry. Inevitably, you are left to cobble together disparate systems in order to get the depth of defense and layering of controls that you need.

A new week, a new rash of attacks against security vendors, email marketers and banks. It would be easy to point fingers and laugh at the irony, especially in the case of security vendors, but that would be both petty and shortsighted.

Whenever the topic of security is mentioned in the context of cloud computing, it is usually discussed as the "big barrier" to adoption. The perceived or actual lack of security in the cloud makes it impossible for businesses to make the leap into this new computing paradigm. I propose a different perspective: Security will rescue cloud computing.

This past year has been a doozy in the security world.

When you ask IT professionals if they use cloud computing or software-as-a-service, most start by saying "no". But if you ask some follow up questions, you will quickly find out about "that one application" that is a SaaS application.

Information security was always an esoteric field but with personal computing came personal security issues, culminating in the identity theft problem that concerns even the most techno-phobic of consumers. It's about to get much worse.

Data center architecture has been changing quite dramatically over the past few years. In many data centers, organic growth had left them broken up into application silos. The standard three-tier architecture was copied for each application leading to a fairly hierarchical network. In this architecture, some core security services, such as firewalls and intrusion prevention, were concentrated at the root of the network tree, closest to the ingress routers and around any  DMZs.