| In the last decade information and computer security is mainly moving from the confines of academia to the enterprise concerns. As populations become more and more comfortable with the extensive use of networks and the Internet, as our reliance on the knowledge-intensive technology grows, and as progress in the computer software and wireless telecommunication increases accessibility, there will be a higher risk of unmanageable failure in enterprise systems.
In fact, today’s information systems are widely spread and connected over the networks, but also heterogeneous, which involves more complexity. This situation has a dramatic drawback regarding threats, which are now occurring on such networks. Indeed, the drawback of being open and interconnected is that they are more and more vulnerable as a wide range of threats and attacks. These attacks have appeared during the last few years and are growing continuously with IP emergence and with all new technologies exploiting it (SIP vulnerabilities, phishing attacks, etc.) and also due to the threats exposing operators (DDOS) and end user (phishing attacks, worms, etc.). The Slammer and SoBig attacks are some of the examples that were widely covered in the media and broadcast into the average citizen home.
From the enterprise perspective, information about customers, competitors, products and processes is a key issue for its success. The increasing importance of information technology for production, providing and maintaining consistent security of this information on servers and across networks becomes one of the major enterprise business activities. This means that it requires a high flexibility of the organizational infrastructure and on the introduction of new ways of information usage.
In such a complex world, there is a strong need of security to ensure system protection in order to maintain the enterprise activities operational. However, this book gathers some essays that will stimulate a greater awareness of the whole range of security issues facing the modern enterprise. It mainly shows how important to have a strong interaction that is required between enterprise goals and security solutions. |