Use of untested IT strategies to cut costs would risk security

Companies pursuing new IT strategies to reduce costs in the prevailing downturn will only end up risking their corporate security, warned experts.

Speaking at the RSA Conference Europe 2008 held in London, chief security strategist, Tim Mather, cautioned business enterprises about the risks involved in using untested technologies.

Economic downturn may push some companies to deploy insecure technologies for cutting costs, Mather warned.

Similar views were held by the Microsoft’s UK security adviser, Ed Gibson, who commented that security would suffer if corporate took its eyes off the important issue.

Mather believed that relatively new technologies lacked security maturity. He listed virtualisation, cloud computing and VoIP technologies that increase system compromise risk. He noted that VoIP was widely implemented within enterprise but not between enterprises.

Another speaker, Ben Jun, technology vice president at Cryptography Research, noted that while technology was fairly established, its security had not been tested fully. He termed it as maturity effort where companies had not reached despite the fact that virtualisation was not new.

Jun informed that virtualisation companies were working on the issue, citing VMware’s launching of VMsafe API. But he commented that its security maturity was not high.

VMware did not respond to comments immediately.

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