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Written by Brian Austin
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Thursday, 15 May 2008 |
 A great debate rages in the realm of computer security as to the proper way to protect vital infrastructure. The old adage of creating a walled garden was sufficient in the days before wireless networks and roaming laptops, but it now necessary to adopt a layer approach to security. on the flip side some security experts now argue that it's impossible to construct a wall around infrastructure and thus state "there is no perimeter".
while I agree that enforcing security only at the perimeter is no longer valid I'm not convinced that we should entirely abandon the concept. Chad Perrin over at TechRepublic agrees in his post There is no perimeter, kinda.
..It's a very popular thing to say in certain circles. It makes you sound cutting-edge and knowledgeable. That's the great thing about these postmodern-sounding declarations that everybody accepts as a simple fact of reality even though they don't even exist — they always make you sound cutting-edge and knowledgeable.
Unfortunately, it's wrong. There is still a perimeter. For the foreseeable future, there will always be a perimeter. The argument that fifty percent of security breaches "don't go through the firewall" is a bit of handwaving and misdirection, really. What about the other fifty percent? How accurate are these statistics, anyway?
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