Beth Schultz

No longer with the option of saying "no" to its employees, organizations are finding that solutions and techniques exist for managing and securing the mobile devices workers wish to connect to the corporate network.

Is a UTM solution right for your enterprise? Many say it depends on whether the multipurpose device can align with your enterprise architecture without drastically slowing network operations. Converged security has found a welcome home among small and midsize companies. But the debate over UTM's fit for larger enterprises rages on.

SC Magazine's first eBook of 2010 takes an over-arching view of the SIEM marketplace, a sector that is expected to grow to $1.4 billion in 2013, according to IDC. In fact, SIEM is driving overall growth in the security and vulnerability management technology sector, with a compound annual growth rate for the five-year period ending in 2013 expected to reach 16 percent. This special eBook offers case studies and input from several experts on how enterprises can benefit from an automated process that can not only help with log management, event filtering and correlation from multiple data sources, but assist with complex queries for investigations, forensics and analysis, as well as bring companies into compliance with many regulations and industry best practices. And the benefits for IT administrators can be rewarding.

Knowing what is going on so you can figure out what to do is one of the biggest challenges facing the enterprise today. Without situational awareness, investigations would require looking into a number of systems and collating incomplete information to get the bigger picture. For many IT administrators, the ability to monitor bandwidth, firewall use and VPN sessions has been simplified with the use of a security information and event management (SIEM) platform. The increasing flexibility of SIEM tools is especially important the more hazardous the threat landscape becomes. This latest eBook from SC Magazine surveys the SIEM landscape and digs into several actual use cases to examine the benefits and challenges faced by enterprises and the security teams running SIEM implementations.

Two new federal laws, ARRA and the HITECH Act, aim to do what many say HIPAA has failed to do for the past 14 years: force health care practitioners to get serious about protecting patient health care records. As well, the Obama administration aims to wean health care data off of paper and over to electronic medical records by 2011. Doctors say protection of patient privacy and confidentiality is an integral aspect of their professional practice. However, with budget challenges and lack of security awareness, many health care practices are a long way from compliance. This special ebook from SC Magazine examines how practices around encryption, privacy and security can aid health care practitioners.

Cybersecurity at the federal level requires an evolution, one that shifts from a compliance-based security focus to one centered on security operations and monitoring. As the Obama administration pushes for legislation, federal CIOs and IT security specialists are rethinking strategy and layering in the technologies needed to fortify the nation¹s digital defenses. It is a difficult and challenging problem, and many things will contribute to the overall solution set, but with the federal government budgeting $80 to $90 billion this year on IT, and several large-scale initiatives in place, such as the DNSSEC standard, many experts have cause for optimism.

Instituting controls on all the data passing through an enterprise is a daunting challenge, even for seasoned security professionals. Getting a handle on transmissions over the network and the precious corporate assets stored in databases has become a lot trickier as more and more data is created and shared. Further, developments which push corporate data outside the perimeter - such as use of mobility technology, external social networking and public cloud services - have heightened the need for data-specific security. The good news is that the C-suite, owing to data breach regulations and penalties, is more aware about the need for diligent security processes, and there are tools available for IT security administrators to assist in encryption and automate logging tasks.

Some 73,000 people hold the CISSP certification. But in today's competitive job marketplace, are they enough to separate oneself form the pack?

Security information and event management (SIEM) tools have frustrated many - yet they are here to stay, reports Beth Schultz.