Jericho Forum, which promulgates this false idea, many CIO’s are going to make bad security investment decisions.
If there is one meme that needs to be squelched it is the concept of the “disappearing perimeter”. Thanks to the
This quote from an industry analyst sums up today’s confusion:
The paradigm of having a big red circle where everything inside is good and everything outside is bad is over,” says Nick Selby, research director of The 451 Group’s enterprise security practice. “Where’s the circle? Where’s the perimeter?
the airport. Embassies, consulates, military bases, sometimes even diplomatic personnel are extensions of a country’s perimeter; and they are defensible.
It seems like no one can talk about security without evoking walls and moats or a big red circle to describe the concept of a network perimeter. Of course networks are more complicated than that. I like to think of the perimeter as the boundaries around a country. Countries have to allow people, goods, services, communications, airplanes, money, air and water across their perimeter. No one talks about countries abandoning their perimeters because they are porous or hard to define. Many countries extend their domain into other countries. Ever get on a plane to the US from Toronto? You cross into the US at
your network, your assets, your business. You have to protect the network so you have to defend your perimeter. You cannot invest the type of money it would take to protect every end point, application, database, and user from every attack. It is a costly mistake to buy into deperimeterization.
If you take fractals 101 (well, usually it is 501 in graduate school) you are introduced to the UK border problem. How do you measure the perimeter of an island? It depends on the scale of the measuring tool. Using a map will give you a different number than a tape measure or a yard stick (the UK likes to think they have gone metric but everyone there still knows what a yard is). At the scale of a grain of sand how do you even determine where the perimeter is? Perimeters of islands, clouds, and broccoli are all fractals. They have the property of the closer you look at them the more complicated they get.
Networks are fractals. On a large scale they are represented by simple assumptions: outside and inside, the Internet versus the corporate network. As you get more granular you see the remote offices, home users, and mobile devices. You even get granular differences based on protocol: Skype yes, Bittorrent, no.
Yes it is complicated. Yes it is difficult to protect. But it is
Your network is yours. Find it. Define it. Protect it.
