Don't cut IT security during financial troubles, says Senetas CEO

The financial storm hitting corporations all over the world has taken its fair share of victims and businesses are looking at making cuts wherever they can.

However end-users are asked not to scrimp on security, when looking at making IT trimmings.

John DuBois, CEO at Senetas told CRN the evidence that it sees, suggests that in this climate the cyber criminals are and have been even more active and there are many soft targets.

"Organisations who spend massively on their internal network, firewalls and desktop [are likely to] exclude securing sensitive information (data, voice and video) on their external backup systems, linked SAN's (storage area networks) and disaster recovery sites," he said.

"Most of these people believe they are safe and 'it would not happen to us'.

"The Internet has become the holdup weapon of choice, rather than the gun."

DuBois said risk-averse organisations are coming to Senetas in a number of geographies wanting to ensure their corporate financial information, their customer data and their enterprise IP is not compromised by the fact that they are globally-connected. 

Central banks in some countries have mandated that all banks operating in their geography that connect to the Central Bank secure all their links, both internally and externally.

"They see encryption as a robust security solution and thus a business enabler for them in a potentially hostile environment," said DuBois.

 According to DuBois, there are distinct markets in the IT security sector. 

While ATM and the slower link encryptors are aging technologies, there remain significant opportunities for these products in the Middle East and many of the South-East Asian economies.

Synchronous optical networking (SONET) defines interface standards at the physical layer of the OSI seven-layer model.

The standard defines a hierarchy of interface rates that allow data streams at different rates to be multiplexed.

SONET establishes Optical Carrier (OC) levels from 51.8 Mbps (OC-1) to 9.95 Gbps (OC-192).

"[It's] a niche high end technology which continues to be sold to Defence, government and carriers in the US and Europe," said DuBois.

"Ethernet is our fastest selling device with a growing product range from 10Mbps to 10 Gbps.

"[The product] is growing demand in all geographies and some parts of Asia are managing perfectly well on well below 10 Mbps links."

DuBois said Senetas has positioned itself as a provider of Layer 2 encryption, with speeds from below 2Mbps up to 10Gbps covering ATM, SONET, Ethernet, Microwave, Satellite and Fibre Channel. 

"Our CypherStream offering includes switchable Layer 2 and 3 in one device with customised and selectable algorithms in a smaller footprint," he said.

"Our next high speed product will take us to 40Gbps and up to 100Gbps and all products,  where required will eventually have switchable Layer 2 and 3 available in one device.

"We have interest from new emerging opportunities for new channels to re-badge our devices and we will encourage this as we expand our global footprint across products and services."