Page 7 - Cyber Defense Magazine - Global Print Edition 2018

he professional life of a security practitioner is a fast-paced one. Con-
stantly having to respond to the shifting tactics of the adversary, hav-
ing to understand and secure new infrastructural implementations
Tand delivery platforms, and both facilitating and yes, mitigating the
changes in user behaviour over time. All too often the enterprise still thinks
of the security function as a bolt-on one. The business is structured, the archi-
tecture implemented, and the employees are hired. The fires are started and
then someone calls the security team; “Secure this”.

“Firefighting” for many years has been the default operational mode of an
information security department. To borrow from Bono, we are running
to stand still. Securing infrastructure as it is implemented, responding to
breaches after they happen, patching vulnerabilities once the exploit is al-
ready in the wild, auditing inventory already in use is barely workable now,
what of the enterprise of the future?

The single biggest infrastructure change just over the horizon is the advent
of 5G in 2020. 5G promises a wealth of benefits (many of which we have ex-
perienced more than once before) much greater bandwidth, faster connec-
tivity with lower latency over a wider geographic area to many more devices,
in the same way achieved by previous iterations (2G, 2.5G (GPRS & EDGE), 3G,
4G/LTE). While standards are still being finalised, what is important to note
with 5G is that it follows the same KPI trend as those previous iterations, so
we can expect an order of magnitude improvement over 4G in things like
data rate, and critically in latency.

CYBER DEFENSE MAGAZINE – ANNUAL GLOBAL PRINT EDITION 2018 – SPONSORED BY TREND MICRO 7