Carriers strong on security, analyst says

An interview with Forrester analyst Richard Fichera

When it comes to physical and information security, the telecommunications industry ranks among the best-positioned sectors of the U.S. economy, according to Forrester analyst Richard Fichera.

I interviewed Fichera when he was in Washington, D.C. recently to speak at the 2005 Homeland & Global Security Summit. While the summit dealt mostly with the issues facing government agencies trying to counter terrorism and respond to disasters, Fichera and I spoke about the progress that private industry has made in improving security since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fichera says that the telecommunications and financial services segments have done a better job of beefing up their security processes and technology than other industry segments that control what's considered critical infrastructure for the nation's economy.

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When it comes to physical and information security, the telecommunications industry ranks among the best-positioned sectors of the U.S. economy, according to Forrester analyst Richard Fichera.

I interviewed Fichera when he was in Washington, D.C. recently to speak at the 2005 Homeland & Global Security Summit. While the summit dealt mostly with the issues facing government agencies trying to counter terrorism and respond to disasters, Fichera and I spoke about the progress that private industry has made in improving security since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fichera says that the telecommunications and financial services segments have done a better job of beefing up their security processes and technology than other industry segments that control what's considered critical infrastructure for the nation's economy.

"These sectors understand the importance of IT security and resilience, and they have more people on staff that understand this," Fichera says. "There are some Wall Street houses that are spending between 9% and 11% of their revenues on IT. These companies understand that the bits are their products."

Fichera says that the telecom industry is in "pretty good shape and the networks themselves are designed to be reliable." But he admits that the changing ownership of all the major ISPs could have a trickle-down effect in terms of hurting the morale of telecom workers and, therefore, the effectiveness of network operations.

However, Fichera points out that enterprise buyers of Internet services are gaining redundancy because wireless communications can now serve as a more realistic backup for wireline communications.

The industry segments that Fichera says are lagging in security are electricity, petrochemical, natural gas, oil, smoke stack manufacturing, food transportation and food distribution.

"The utilities in particular are more exposed on a physical level with miles of power lines that are hard to protect," he says. "The consequences of an attack for the utilities are also more severe."

Fichera's opinions should be good news for corporate network managers, who are increasingly dependent on ISPs for their mission-critical voice and data networks. Fichera is bullish on the performance and reliability of the Internet in particular.

"Bringing down the Internet is pretty tough," he says. "My one concern is that the Internet infrastructure is dominated by a few components," such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser and Internet Information Services Web server software, as well as the open-source Apache Web server software.

"The ideal solution from a security point of view would be for us to have 200 different Web servers and clients and for them all to be slightly different, but that would be an utter disaster from an economic point of view," he says.

Fichera points out that IT buyers need to be aware that some Internet vendors have better products than others when it comes to security.

"Sun has a pretty good record with Solaris. In general, the Unix vendors are better," Fichera says. He adds that despite its share of security problems, "Microsoft is light-years ahead of where it was with security five years ago. Windows Server 2005 is way ahead of Windows 2000 or NT."