Secur(e/ity) Management: A Continuing Uphill Climb

Abstract

With ever growing and evolving threats and cyber attacks, the management of enterprise security and the security of enterprise management systems are key to business—if not a nation’s—operations and survival. Secur(e/ity) management, the moniker for the intertwined topics of secure management and security management, has evolved trying to keep pace. The history of secur(e/ity) management is traced from its origins in the disjoint silos of telecommunications, internetworking and computer security to today’s recognition as necessary, interdisciplinary, interworking technologies and operations. An overview of threats and attacks upon managed and management systems shows that occurrences of ever more sophisticated, complex and harder to detect cyber misconduct are increasing as are the severity and costs of their consequences. Introduction of new technologies, expansion of the perimeters of an enterprise and trends in collaborative business partnerships compound the number of managed system targets of cyber compromise. Technical and marketplace trends in secur(e/ity) management reveal needs that must be bridged. Research attention should focus on developing axiomatic understanding of the natural laws of security, tools to realize vulnerability-free software, metrics for assessing the efficacy of secur(e/ity) management, tools for default-deny strategies so that signature-based security management can be retired, secur(e/ity) management approaches for virtualized and service-oriented environments, and approaches for composite, holistic, secur(e/ity) management.