By Vic Mankotia, Vice President, Security, Asia Pacific, CA Technologies
For many years now, IT practitioners have advocated and pressed towards standardisation of IT equipment within an enterprise. The gains were obvious and unquestionable. Uniform equipment meant lower buying costs, ease of maintenance, quick repair and replacement, vendor consolidation and enhanced security. This was applied ruthlessly across data centres, network equipment and especially end-user computing devices. The last were targeted more so because that is where devices are the most numerous and scattered.
With the benefit of unabashed hindsight, however, one can say this was a dam waiting to be breached. Firstly, human beings want to be anything but standardised − they want to be unique in what they possess and flaunt. Secondly, innovation always trumps control.
The first factor was kept in check largely because end-user computing devices were limited in their form factor – viz. laptops and desktops. The second factor came into play as a result of the combination of computing power becoming cheap and miniaturised, software gaining pre-eminence over hardware, and user experience being elevated to the top rung of design factors.
After the iPhone, nothing was the same again. The iPad and Android platform only reconfirmed this. People finally had devices that were every bit as powerful as what they were issued at work but since these tools didn’t belong to their employers, were open to customisation. The floodgates have been opened, and IT has been “consumerised”.
The next step was the nightmare scenario for information security managers coming true. People started using their new devices to access corporate information like emails, price lists, contacts and much more. They were doing this without the company having any control over the access point. Out went features like “remote wipe” and long-enforced goals like standardisation. People were finally free to access any information they wanted from any device they owned – iPhone, Evo, iPad, Nexus One and Dell Streak. The list is long and distinguished.
Around the same time, IT departments finally gave up on centralised decision making and standardisation of devices. Instead, they switched to consolidating what the devices were used to access – information. The content was anyway more important than the container. Enter the cloud.
If devices and access points were a lost cause, control would have to be exerted elsewhere. The forces that destroyed standardisation created an opportunity to consolidate information and serve it on-demand in a secure and seamless manner, independent of where it was being accessed from. Once this paradigm shift had occurred, endless new possibilities presented themselves. Information could be freed from having to be present on every end-point in order to be accessible and current. Keeping information in a small number of data centres turned out to be more cost effective than having to maintain it in an up-to-date fashion across thousands, or tens of thousands, of end-points. Serving information up from a location where total and absolute control could be established – through modern Identity & Access Management solutions – was also more secure than having information reside on an unwieldy number of devices roaming the world. “Remote wipe” wasn’t even needed.
Failing a set of conditions, the cloud could terminate the data stream or it could modify, restrict and change the stream to suit the access location, device, carrier or any other condition. An employee could access the information from a tablet, smartphone or Internet-enabled TV but the information would always live somewhere else.
The consumerisation of IT has enabled a complete break between information and access points. Think of it this way − it is a laughable idea to have a power source at every outlet in the country. Instead, power is generated at one place, and then transmitted to where it is needed. But the first scenario was exactly how information was being served − it lived wherever it was needed. The IT industry has finally caught up with the power generation and distribution utilities.
The big opportunity now lies in building and securing the cloud. As the industry evolves and finds solutions in these areas, cloud will become ubiquitous and businesses will run more efficiently and securely than ever.
