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Here is an Excerpt from our Small Business Guide to Security:

Overview: Forging a Suit of Armor:

As it was during the age of chivalry, the knight protected the realm as the security officer who wore a suit of armor that protected him from most attacks. The suit of armor was made up of several pieces of technology that provided an overall protection scheme. The individual components were crafted to provide certain types of protection or levels of protection combining to secure the entire knight/enterprise.

 Today’s IT/IS business environment has its knights who don their suite of protection devices to create a suit of armor that protects the enterprise from attacks from hackers, phreaks, and newbies who try to gain unauthorized access, impersonate users, and create denial of service attacks. ⁶ The layout of the enterprise is as it was during the age of chivalry, the castle enterprise is surrounded by a moat (DMZ) where there are devices to stop a frontal assault; there is the gate with its drawbridge, the firewall, which inspects all traffic going in and out and closes the drawbridge and gates if it perceives and attack based on its rule set. There are the thick wall of protection to keep the citizens inside safe from missiles launched at the walls and over the walls, like viruses, spyware, denial of service and other attacks. ² The counter measures are virus protection, spyware scanners, and kernel level protection software. ⁴ 

The realm has other means of protecting itself through the use of PGP to encrypt all its messages in and out, local files and data, VPN to protect communications externally and remote access from outside to inside the castle, and passwords that are impossible to crack. ⁷ The knight has an arsenal of weapons to fight back, the sniffer to see what traffic is out there, the IDS sensor to see what types of attacks the enemy is using, honey pots in the moat that bate the attacker so he can be captured and punished, and the physical security of locks and keys, smart cards, Secure ID systems, and others. ⁶

 All these tools combined provide the realm (an enterprise) a formidable suite of armor to protect itself from attacks by frontal assaults, encased in files/email, and internal/external breaches of physical security. This suit of armor is considered expensive to maintain, as it is hard to forge. Just as it was during the age of chivalry, the costs for knights and their tools of service were cost prohibitive and only the richest kingdoms could afford the complete package. This leaves the small and medium size businesses to fend for them selves, and purchase the systems they have to afford and cannot live without due to regulations for data security, and the cost of  not having the basic protections because of downtime, system rebuilds, and loss of customers due to perceptions about the lack of security…..

 But it is within their reach; many companies like Cisco, Microsoft, Computer Associates, and others have a full range of security products ranging from the individual budget to the corporate enterprise. For the small business it is a matter of finding the most cost effective tools and the right consultant to design, build, and train the small business to maintain their own security.

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Last modified: October 28, 2007