Global security guru holds forth at Infosec 2008

Howard Schmidt, former VP and Chief Information Security Officer for eBay, and Chief Security officer of Microsoft Corporation was the keynote speaker at the recently held Infosec 2008 in Mumbai. He was also appointed by President George Bush Junior, as a special adviser for Cyberspace Security for the White House. He also co-authored the Black Book on Corporate Security. Infosec 2008 was an evangelization event for enterprises to underline the importance of security in their overall network infrastructure.
Pointing to the importance of security, Schmidt said, “30 percent of the companies have no clue about security; while 50 percent know about the existing security threats. Recognizing where the problem lies and finding the required solution for those security threats can avoid major disasters of entire systems on the network crashing.”
He also noted that in order to have successful business, companies need to secure their entire network and not just pieces of it. “If companies don't do this, then they should not be in the business. Realizing how to manage information security in SMBs will make big difference to their future performance and growth,” he added.
Other presenters at the event were Raghu Raman, CEO, Mahindra Special Service Groups as well as Presenjit Shah, VP and Global Head-Enterprise Security Solutions, Wipro who talked about The Universe of Threat. Amit Mukherjee, CIO of RPG Group; Akhilesh Tuteja, Head of IT Advisory Practice, KPMG and A Dhananjaya Chief Compliance and Risk Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Service, touched the topic.
Raman spoke about the importance of a CEO's participation in the overall security planning of any IT network. He also talked about 6 forces of risk, which influences the core of business.
Tuteja touched upon the need for SMBs to go beyond return on investment (RoI) calculation when it came to budgeting for security. In his presentation he stressed that there are three lies about RoI, ie lies, damn lies and internal rate of return (IRR) he also said there is 12 percent increase in the deployment of anti virus solutions on a network while the outbreak of viruses was 29 percent and there was a six percent investment in firewall appliances while there was a 10 percent increase in intrusion. He exhorted that there was an urgent need to bridge this gap.
Shah on the other hand noted that security of an organization could be divided in to three parts-people, process, and technology. Technology, he defined, was the measurement and reporting and monitoring and response. He also held forth on the importance of policy management.
Dhananjay gave a totally different take on information security. According to him info-security can't be treated as an investment sector. It is a basic hygiene factor. “Currently, info-security is colliding with IT security, when in reality it belongs to larger domain of risk rather than IT,” he noted.
The event also had an exhibition area where various security vendors have put up stalls and gave visitors more information about their available products and solutions.