Cloud Security Needs Addressing

SAN FRANCISCO — With enterprise data growing at an overall rate of 60 percent per year, it’s time to take a closer look at that information and determine its economic value. Because if we don’t, the bad guys certainly will.

That was the warning from Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) CEO Enrique Salem, speaking here at the RSA Conference 2010. He warned that as computing power moves out to the cloud, that will drive a need for digital devices to provide you with greater access to that data.

But, he added, mobile devices are increasing in importance along with cloud computing, and they require new security methodologies to deter data theft.

“IDC says there will be one billion cell phones accessing the Internet by the end of this year. Right now, there are 1.3 billion PCs connected to the Internet. We need to think about how do we secure that device,” he told the audience.

An economy defined by intellectual property, such as the U.S.’s, means it’s all about the value of information, and the bad guys know this. Cyber attacks are shifting from being broad-based to being very targeted, Salem said.

Symantec’s 2010 State of Enterprise Security survey spoke with 2,100 CIOs and IT/security executives, and found 75 percent had been attacked in the last six months — and all of those had suffered some kind of data loss; it may have been intellectual property, financial or credit card data or the personal information of a customer.

And the old methods of cyber security simply don’t cut it any more. Salem said that in 2008, Symantec added 1.6 million signatures to its antimalware software, more than it had in the prior 16 years combined. In 2009, that increased to 2.9 million more signatures added.

Read the rest at eSecurity Planet.