Cloud Ushers In New Security Frontier

Just as the move from the mainframe to distributed open computing environments triggered a number of IT management and security issues, growing cloud adoption threatens to do the same, according to Shavlik Technologies founder Mark Shavlik.

Shavlik should know, having been one of the original developers of Windows NT in the late ‘80s and early ’90s at Microsoft. When he left the software giant in 1993, he didn’t stray too far from his roots, founding Shavlik Technologies – which provides software and services for network vulnerability audit, assessment and patching.

“I left Microsoft just as enterprises were rolling out Windows NT in a big way, going away from mainframes systems,” he explained. “The end user could just do so much more on their own with PCs rather than getting tied up in a mainframe, which would take weeks to implement a change on. But I thought it was amazing how many security problems there could be, having moved from a secure centralised mainframe environment to a completely open distributed one.”

Shavlik said the main problem stems from the fact that people’s use of technology will always outpace the security measures needed to protect it. “If you go back to the ‘90s – when IT departments were rolling out NT – we brought out our first product, worked with Secure Computing, that would crawl the network and say ‘here are all of your security problems’, which I thought would change the world.

“But no one moved – along the way we discovered no one was doing their patching. Even we, who thought we had our networks locked down, were compromised. All because of a missing patch. So we then worked with Microsoft to help tackle the problem, but that was a long time ago. We still haven’t completely solved the problem and we still help Microsoft out.”