A while back, during the interesting time I spent as one of the blognation editors, I did my first ever video interview with the help of Vincent Camara of Intruders.tv. The victim was JP Rangaswami, the MD of BT Design (effectively BT’s CIO ). He was on great form, so my 10 minute spot stretched out to almost 30 minutes! Off camera we were talking about collaboration and social networking platforms. One of the things he said to me which really made an impact was:
“You know David, if you were talking to me about this stuff five years ago, I would have said that’s’ all well and good but can I have it inside my firewall. These days, if we are really serious about being a customer centric organisation, where does this firewall concept come in?”
Last week I noticed James McGovern highlighting the Jim Reavis open letter to the best and the brightest network security architects. He wants is to get some of the best minds together to collaborate and talk about key issues that the next generation firewall must address.
James said:
“Network folks need to realize that there time has come and gone when it comes to securing the modern enterprise. The enterprise is porous as we put more and more web applications on the Internet by exposing them over Port 80 (or 443). Reality says that there is only so much a firewall can possibly do to protect an application and that a better strategy may be to instead figure out how to make the applications protect themselves.”
He’s right - enterprise CIO’s need think differently in the world of enterprise 2.0, and application developers need to keep better watch on design and data security.
