Security gets intelligent

Johannesburg, 23 Jan 2014

CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2014

With IT now at the core of every business and every new business initiative, gaining a competitive edge rests on the quality and scope of a company's IT. Businesses wanting to go big should be sharpening and extending their focus on IT management to ensure IT is an enabler of business growth and innovation. The CA IT Management Symposium is the perfect place for South African IT and business decision-makers to do just that. This event, scheduled for 20 February, brings together leading international and local experts on IT management to provide an update on global IT trends, strategies and technologies. For more information, click here.

A wave of new technology trends has added a great deal of complexity to the task of securing the enterprise, sparking the need for intelligent, granular security.

So says Paul Ferron, director of Security Solutions EMEA at CA Technologies.

"The world is now shifting and new forces impacting significantly on IT are trends such as mobility, social media, big data and the open enterprise," says Ferron. "Once you take a holistic view of what is happening in the environment, it becomes apparent that the way we set up IT today doesn't scale to the needs of tomorrow."

Ferron says IT industry leaders and forward-thinking enterprises are discovering that only single sign-on or enterprise lockdowns are not the answer. "Now, IT security needs to be based on a parameter-driven decision engine that changes the rules in line with various factors. For example, if a CFO needs access to the stock exchange SharePoint files, you may want him to be able to access them from the office or his company laptop at home, but not from a public kiosk at an airport in China. Therefore, you need real-time intelligent access decision-making."

With intelligent access management, he says, the task of determining the rules for access can move to management, the role of IT is simplified, and certain cost efficiencies can emerge as enterprises slowly see less need for myriad, complex security solutions.

"At CA Technologies, we observed a need for simplified, more effective security management early, and launched CA CloudMinder last year, to provide identity management, advanced authentication and federated single sign-on to cloud and on-premise applications. Now, we are seeing both major vendors and start-ups focusing on this class of service."

Ferron will discuss the new security challenges, the need for a holistic approach to IT security, and the CA CloudMinder system at the upcoming CA IT Management Symposium Africa 2014. He will also outline use cases and elaborate on major clients who have implemented CA CloudMinder.

For more information about this event and to reserve your seat, click here.