Enclaves: the Enterprise

Even in the most secure organizations, information security threats and vulnerabilities are increasing over time. Vulnerabilities are increasing with the complexity of internal infrastructures; complex structures have more single points of failure, and this in turn increases the risk of multiple simultaneous failures. Organizations are adopting new, untried, and partially tested products at ever-increasing rates. Vendors and internal developers alike are relearning the security lessons of the past — one at a time, painful lesson by painful lesson. Given the rapid rate of change in organizations, minor or incremental improvements in security can be offset or undermined by “organizational entropy.” The introduction of local area networks (LANs) and personal computers (PCs) years ago changed the security landscape, but many security organizations continued to function using centralized control models that have little relationship to the current organizational or technical infrastructures. The Internet has brought new threats to the traditional set of organizational security controls. The success of the Internet model has created a push for electronic commerce (E-commerce) and electronic business (E-business) initiatives inP A Y O F F I D E A