Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

Security

Organisations are now giving security higher prominence as a result of changing business priorities and new legislation. Security is a key element in the architecture of both systems infrastructure and business processes. It embraces many sub-topics that are at different stages in their maturity.

Security is a dynamic concern. The industry is developing new types of product to meet specific requirements. Every new technological development has to be assessed from a security perspective. Security is not just about protection. Security can be turned to business advantage. It opens up new forms of business collaboration, new ways of working (for example in the mobile field), and improved productivity (for example through automated user provisioning).

Areas of research coverage

The Ovum service focuses on three areas that are particularly important to organisations:

Perimeter protection

This covers how corporate IT environments maintain their integrity and usability. It includes peripheral assets such as laptops and WLAN networks. "Defence in depth" is gaining acceptance as users recognise that traditional network firewalls, important as they are, are not sufficient in a world of web services and the more flexible networks that we have today.

Protection against malware

Malware is the scourge of our time. Phishing alone has become a major component in fraud. Spam clogs the networks and mailboxes. The industry is developing many strategies for dealing with this pest, including dealing with the sources of malware, improving the inherent security features of computing platforms, and analysing the behaviour of computers that are infected so that they can be remediated.

Identity management

Identity management is a major concern of enterprises and governments, both for outward facing systems to customers and citizens, and for inward facing systems to employees and business partners. Federation technology is providing ways in which organisations can co-operate in linking their identity management infrastructure. At the "user interface" to identity management systems we are seeing rapid evolution of technologies for identifying and authenticating users.