Data security used to be relatively simple. Office buildings and areas within them presented clear “perimeters” that companies could protect with locks, alarms, and if necessary, searches of belongings. “External endpoints” that needed protection amounted to briefcases that employees might lose. With the rise of computing and data stored on corporate servers and PCs, firewalls emerged to protect the network, and various methods prevented information from leaving the company on disks. Today, however, perimeter protection is vastly more complicated, and corporate data is accessible by an array of endpoints – laptops, tablets and smartphones – that represent an ever-changing perimeter with ever-evolving risks of serious data breaches. As a result, protecting data now requires a dual approach to security: traditional “inside” network security to protect data on servers, and “outside” perimeter security to prevent the use of endpoints to circumvent network security.
According to a recent Dell Global Security Survey, mobility, cloud computing and the Internet of Things are introducing a slew of new risks, and there’s a rise in accidental and malicious internal breaches. The survey also found that 76 percent of IT leaders polled (93 percent in the U.S.) agreed that combating today’s threats requires companies to protect their entire perimeter – inside and outside the organization – by increasing network and endpoint security.