The days of wrapping our enterprise users and systems within a network security perimeter are long gone. In order to better innovate and compete in today’s fast moving markets, the business needs to leverage any opportunity to accelerate new initiatives and create new revenue opportunities. For example, the business brings in SaaS applications to meet their needs if IT can’t deliver services fast enough; it adopts new mobile apps to support employee and customer engagement; it packages its own intellectual property in the form of APIs for growth and agility; and it sets up internal system access for partners and contractors for streamlined operations. This essentially opens the enterprise and creates a challenge for the security team: How to enable and still protect the Open Enterprise.
Because we are expanding on three dimensions at the same time, enabling the secure Open Enterprise presents several challenges: 1) The identity population needing access to enterprise data is moving beyond employees and administrators to include business partners, contract developers and a rapidly growing customer community; 2) At the same time, the applications those groups need access to are migrating from the enterprise data center to the cloud and; 3) The access device is evolving from PC to smartphone and tablet but will quickly include other smart devices such as wearables and smart meters. While opening the enterprise increases the attack surface, securely enabling the open business can help it innovate and grow.