The Internet has evolved from purely a means of communication to become the central interface of networked business processes.
Nowadays a multitude of diverse transactions are processed and controlled electronically.
In our daily lives, common examples include electronic financial transactions and online tax declarations, data entry and processing in CRM and ERP systems involving more than one company, organizing purchasing by e-procurement and e-sourcing, e-mail correspondence, road pricing system, online shopping, virtual auctions and lottery games on the Internet, refilling prepaid cards, and the digital processing of patient data via electronic health cards.
The increasing use of Application Service Providers (ASPs) means that entire applications, and therefore parts of a company’s electronic value-added chain, can be completely outsourced Despite all of its benefits, the move to optimised electronic business processes also opens up vulnerable areas to data theft, industrial espionage, and attacks on IT infrastructures.
As network boundaries become more fluid and applications become ever more complex, there is a corresponding increase in the number of security loopholes which offer potential attackers a wide range of opportunities for their misdeeds.
But it is not only the methods of attack used today, such as phishing or hacking, that are the problem. Increasingly, security risks and new points of attack can be traced back to simple carelessness or poorly implemented electronic processes.
Commercial and industrial espionage
The close technical organizational integration of staff, partners, and customers that is necessary in successful business processes also significantly increases security risks.
In its annual report on IT security for 2005, the German Federal Ministry for Security in Information Technology (BSI) wrote, “The Internet is opening up new dimensions for commercial and competitive espionage. The methods used to detect and manipulate data and services are becoming more and more professional. Technology and specialist
knowledge are the classic targets for thieves, but gaining a competitive advantage by spying on offers, contracts, and pricing information is also on the increase. Snooping on corporate networks with the aim of gaining unauthorized knowledge of enterprise data will become more common in the next ten years”. This warning from the BSI is based on several studies by the corporate consultants KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in the two previous years, which showed that over 70% of companies consider industrial espionage to be a threat, and that more than 80% of respondents expect the number of espionage attacks to rise in future. Moreover, the Institute of Directors (IoD), an association with headquarters in London, and more than 55,000 decision-makers world-wide from all sectors os industry all sectors of industry stated that among its members 60% of them had already suffered harm from the theft of information.
Because business-critical information of all kinds needs reliable protection against unauthorized access, manipulation, and theft, IT security is one of management’s most important tasks today in business, in public administration (e-government), and in healthcare (e-health).
New business processes, technologies, and legal requirements require new security strategies. In a dynamic competitive environment, the ability to quickly modify and extend security mechanisms as system landscapes grow and become more heterogeneous is no simple task.
SSI Pacific security solutions provide optimum protection when you need efficient and cost-effective secure business processes or need to comply with legal and company-wide security requirements.
