Government encourages IT

- competitive edge in business

Driving network security business and trends:

GAYAN Kanchana

“Overview and way forward on Sri Lanka’s network security market” report states that the rate of adoption of IT is in its developing stages in Sri Lanka and has been encouraged by the Government due to the competitive edge IT provides in business.

This report was unveiled at the South Asia Enterprise Security Summit 2009 which was hosted by the global business research consulting company, Frost and Sullivan recently

According to the report, the Government’s spending in Sri Lanka remained pretty strong and focused in 2008 and attained the third position. This also goes to show the commitment of the Sri Lankan Government in addressing all relevant IT matters, as well as its salient role in driving the network security business and trends.

This vertical is expected to show the highest growth amongst all verticals in the forecast period 2007-2015.

The report also revealed that the telecom sector is leading the market when it comes to adopting network security technologies in Sri Lanka with most of the telecom players catering to the domestic market.

BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) stood as the second largest spender.

Deputy Director ICT (Information Communication Technology) Practice, Frost and Sullivan South Asia and Middle East Girish Trivedi said, “In today’s ICT advanced world, computers and the internet play a dominant role. You may either switch on your computer or use any other related state of the art devices”

“However, threats in the networked world are getting bigger and becoming more malicious and moving from external to internal.

Enterprises need to evaluate and preempt these threats as the gap between attacks/attempt made to detection is abysmally low.

As most attacks go undetected or unreported, enterprises maintain the misconception that they are safe, and the consequences (resulting from a security breach) can be anything from losing reputation, customers, and competitive advantage, to legal issues, leading to considerable financial loss,” he said.“The world is changing and flexible new technologies delivering revolutionary forms of collaboration and communication are transforming the way businesses interact, both internally and externally.

Mobile devices and virtual platforms have torn down the already wavering notion of a “network perimeter”; this has led to newer threats and risks, and as these have evolved, so have our responses to them.

Cisco with the approach of Comprehensive Threat Intelligence, End-to-End security solution and Business-enabling Services provide a rich, highly secure collaborative experience using the Network as the Platform,” said Senior Manager - Systems Engineering, Cisco Systems - India and SAARC, Arun Shetty.