Add to favorites EMEA chief executive tells CBR about cloud, cybercrime and the Internet of Things.
After 20 years in the industry, Symantec’s EMEA CEO Matt Ellard talks to CBR about IT security, the cloud and how cybercrime could threaten the Internet of Things (IoT).
The security industry seems to be moving towards a more reactive model of protection, rather than one based on perimeter defences. Does that tally with your experience?
Yeah, pretty much. You’ll have seen a lot of discussion about what we would call advanced threat protection. You still need to have a boundary that is a perimeter, but as threats get more advanced you need other layers that can identify more threats to your business, and take a proactive approach to start nullifying those threats.
We advise a lot of companies to start classifying their info as either IT or client data. You should put together the right intelligence, governance and compliance tools to make sure it’s protected, and make sure you are only sharing data with those you need to.
Would you say the digital world is becoming more or less dangerous?
Without doubt threats are becoming more sophisticated, and if you start looking at the whole threat landscape cybercrime is becoming more targeted. There’s been a couple of releases recently where you can see these are sophisticated organisations committing these crimes. You have to have multi-layers of protections and you have to be more proactive
What are some of the challenges digital security is likely to face as IoT becomes more prevalent?
It’s that balance again. You can see there is a lot of productivity and a lot of competitive advantage for those who win the race.
We see two complications. Data is exploding already. It’s growing to the tune of 100-200% year on year, and you can add to that up to 70% of data can be duplicated. As a huge amount of money is being spent on storing and backing up that data, the Internet of Things is only going to make that worse.
The second point is that these are all going to be entry points for the bad guys to get in. Any device that is connected to a machine is going to be seen as a platform for potential data breaches.
