IBM Puts Security at Your Fingertips
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Looking to lock up your notebook and its data? IBM is offering you a new choice: its already attractive Thinkpad T42 series now integrates a fingerprint reader.
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Hoping to drive biometric devices into the mainstream, IBM on Monday unveiled its first ThinkPad that features an integrated fingerprint reader that will work in tandem with an embedded security system.
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IBM has extended its range of radio frequency identification (RFID) offerings with a suite of services targeting industrial companies and mid-market businesses.
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Fujitsu's new palm-vein biometric security scanner is designed to control computer access in corporate environments.
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IBM has added a new feature to WebSphere Application Server designed to help safeguard Internet business applications against outages.
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[Business India] Los Angeles, Oct 5 : IBM has introduced a biometric notebook computer with an integrated fingerprint reader that can recognise the user of the computer, reports Xinhua.
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Microsoft has developed a convenient solution for replacing all those passwords with something you don&#39;t have to worry about forgetting: your fingerprint.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) has unveiled a collection of new services designed to bring the benefits of radio-frequency identification (RFID) systems to industrial firms and mid-size businesses. The goal is to help smaller companies comply with mandates to adopt the technology by  Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), the Department of Defense and other organizations.
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Also: Tactile passwords could stop ATM 'shoulder-surfing'
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&quot;Today we raised the bar on security for the entire PC industry,&quot; IBM Personal Computing Division General Manager Fran O&#39;Sullivan said.
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The software, developed by IBM&#39;s new Sensors and Actuators business unit, is designed to help businesses collect and act on data from RFID and other sensor-based technology.
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ThinkPad T42 is equipped with biometric device designed to limit access to sensitive data.
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IBM Corp. Monday introduced a security service that offers a concise, monthly global-network threat report designed to help organizations assess security needs and vulnerabilities from a business perspective.
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IBM is aggressively expanding its security portfolio in hopes of becoming the de facto source of advice and technology for businesses looking to adopt high-level IT governance and risk management strategies -- a transformation among customers that officials at Big Blue cite as both ongoing and inevitable.As the waves of security threats and data management regulations have washed ashore and left organizations struggling to balance perimeter and internal security concerns with mounting obligations to protect highly-valuable data, companies are being forced to take more of a top-down approach that addresses broad sets of IT-oriented risks, versus individual problems, IBM officials maintain.And while a host of players ranging from security software makers to massive IT consultants have begun marketing themselves as those best suited to help customers embrace a governance and risk management approach, IBM executives claim that their firm's mix of technology, services and partnerships place it at the top of any list of providers capable of helping organizations prepare their security operations for the future."We feel that we're ahead of the curve and driving forward our ability to meet these needs, some of which that might not yet have emerged from a broad perspective," said Kris Lovejoy, IBM's director of corporate security strategy."We feel that we are creating security risk management capabilities and have an opportunity to commoditize them in a way that can be leveraged at large," she said. "From an overall strategic perspective, that doesn't mean that customers are ready to stand up en masse right now and require everything we've built, but we're actively trying to extend the portfolio in advance of that trend."Industry specialists, including Symantec and McAfee, the world's two largest security software makers, have also adopted high-level product and marketing efforts meant to help customers move away from battling individual threats and compliance regulations in favor of a more generic risk management strategy, but IBM claims that it is better positioned to help customers move in that direction today.While the traditional security vendors have long been focused on shipping products that address various elements of end-to-end security and have only moved into risk management in the last two years, Big Blue has its own products and services as well as partnerships with those very vendors and many others that give it an upper hand, IBM executives said."In a sense, today, security is like a car without a steering wheel, and we think we're the only vendor who has the right abilities across all the involved domains that can drive change across business processes," said Eric McNeil, manager of corporate security strategy at IBM. "These other companies touch on a lot of domains, but we're the only ones who have all the pieces that span identity, applications security, physical security, and asset lifecycle management."With its broad array of product and services skills, the executives said that IBM is best qualified to pull together key components that will allow more organizations to manage security using analytical reporting, policy creation and enforcement, and through the use of risk analysis dashboards.The executives cite two areas, IT service management and master data management, as tremendously important to its ability to aid customers in addressing risk. To be able to build controls to oversee change and configuration issues on the services side and help companies get their heads around the intricacies of master data management, customers will need more than the traditional security vendors can offer, said Lovejoy."The security companies of the future are not the companies that offer capabilities for the newest bells and whistles, it's about those things and more, including all the plumbing needed to make these strategies work," said Lovejoy. "While traditional security players that off threat management have great benefits in securing a perimeter, they're not adept at installation of basic plumbing, which actually helps in managing the majority of the risk."Partners fret about potential downgrades Throughout its Global Technology Services unit and IBM software group, including its Tivoli product lines, Big Blue officials contend that the company is far better suited to handle configuration and change management around complex issues like employee identity.Top executives at Symantec and McAfee concede that IBM enjoys a unique position in the security sector based on the breadth of its products and partnerships and its huge services delivery capabilities.And while the CEOs of both companies first point out that they consider IBM as one of their closest and most important partners, respectively, they maintain that they too have strengths in IT governance and risk management that will continue to distinguish them from the technology giant.They also said that IBM will have to resist the urge to promote its own security technologies at the expense of providing customers with best-of-breed technology."They're a different beast than us because they play such a big services integration game up and down the IT stack, but it does seem sometimes that everything does look 'blue' to them," said David DeWalt, chief executive at McAfee. "We're not looking to compete with them, and there's not a lot of overlap, so the idea will be to continue to partner where we can."While recognizing that his company partners with IBM around the globe and that he considers it extremely valuable to continue to do so, John Thompson, chief executive at Symantec, said that there are concerns about IBM giving preference to its in-house technologies.Prior to joining Symantec nine years ago, Thompson served in the role of general manager of IBM Americas and a member of the company's Worldwide Management Council."The issue in terms of our relationship with IBM is if they will continue to be open to technologies that come from outside their own software group, or will they have a strategy as has been articulated as 'blue on blue,' or IBM services packaged around IBM software," Thompson said. "To the extent that they bias their engagements that way, they might limit their ability to compete, and it is clear that they have an institutional bias if you look at some of the things that we have observed on the marketplace."Responding to those comments, IBM's Lovejoy said that while IBM has continued to make investments in expanding its security product portfolio -- most notably via the acquisition of Internet Security Systems for $1.3 billion in August 2006 -- that it will continue to foster a best-of-breed approach using its partners to ensure it meets its customers' needs.She also noted that IBM's services business would never have grown to become over half of the company's annual revenue without a "vendor agnostic" approach.Industry experts said that IBM and its security partners are likely to compete more frequently as the company acquires additional products and its rivals build out their services and risk management capabilities.However, said Paul Stamp, analyst with Forrester Research, all the involved parties likely have too much riding on their existing partnerships for any competitive ill will to affect their relationships."There will be competition, but I think that IBM sees this risk management issue as going far beyond what we consider traditional security, they are looking more at setting policies and security within a larger IT management framework that includes performance management, data governance and overall business services issues," said Stamp."If anything I think Symantec will compete with them more in some areas, and there will be areas where [Symantec] has some individual strengths, but these companies all need to partner," he said. "You also have to remember that customers IT shops aren't monolithic, and each company will continue to sell into different constituencies; in the end there should be room for everyone."
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Software maintains security on laptops when they're outside the network.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) today revealed a new software technology from its Research labs designed to greatly enhance security and management capabilities in virtualized data centers.
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(InfoWorld) - The companies that are having the most success in advancing their data security efforts today are those that are finding a way to protect sensitive information without getting in the way of business users, industry experts maintain. In crafting their data-handling policies and selecting from the multitude of security technologies at their fingertips, those businesses that can foster both ready access to information, along with strong defenses for end-users and IT systems, are making progress the fastest, claim leading vendors and service providers. After years of "throwing technologies" at the data security problem while juggling complex business demands along with external threats and regulatory compliance audits, some businesses are finally discovering that they can simplify the entire process by taking a more comprehensive approach to tailoring their programs to the manner in which their users access, handle, and share information. Even within IT giants like IBM, the struggle to balance security issues with emerging business demands to work with information in new ways hasn't always been approached in this manner, said Julie Donahue, vice president of the security and privacy service in the company's Global Technology Services group. Only through experience and ongoing efforts to constantly rationalize security policies with business demands has the massive firm been able to get a grip on its own data-handling needs, she said. "Customers need to step back and see what their own culture wants. If we locked down everything within IBM, it would be so difficult to manage that we would have a serious management problem, so you have to ask questions around culture before you begin thinking of enforcement," said Donahue. "You have to assess the risk environment and think of this as a holistic problem in terms of how you place bets and need to manage pools of risk, even though that for most CIOs it often feels like you have to spend your time going day-to-day dealing with the crisis of the moment," she said. "You really need to look at where to make the right investments, where to do enforcement, and where to monitor to have a truly strategic view." Donahue said that when IBM was building its security practice roughly 16 months ago, it found that customers were spending as much as 10 percent of their IT budgets dealing with the maintenance and complexity of their data security systems. The only way to reduce the data security management headache is to design an internal framework for managing infrastructure to ensure that investments are being made wisely, she said. In many cases, those companies that are succeeding in that regard are treating their data assets just as they would treat cold, hard cash, the expert maintains. "Companies need to protect their vast ecosystem of data like it is a monetary system, they really have to think about it that way," said Donahue. "It can't be the data center's problem or the network administrator's responsibility alone to protect its security; it has to be everyone's responsibility throughout the entire company." IBM learns about security leaks the hard way As evidence of the types of things that can happen to undermine even a comprehensive security game plan, Donahue pointed to IBM's loss of two backup tapes that contained sensitive information about former employees earlier this year. While the incident was actually related to IBM's provider of backup storage services, the company was forced to pay out roughly $22 million in remediation costs related to informing those people who had been affected and providing credit monitoring services and the like for those individuals, she said. In that sense, companies must also require the highest security standards from their business partners, said the expert. IBM has since written stronger backup-tape handling policies into its contract with its partner as a result of the incident, and Donahue encouraged others to do the same. Phillip Dunkelberger, chief executive at encryption software specialists PGP, said that companies are spending too much time trying to react to data incidents and the individual mandates of compliance regulations while overlooking opportunities to improve data security through smarter process control. Many companies are still too concerned with protecting various endpoint devices and network assets when a more data-driven approach would save them both time and money, he said. "It has to be about the data. Data is very much the currency that people are transacting with, and employees need to be able to get their jobs done, even if that means taking information outside the network," said Dunkelberger. "As complexity grows, things happen -- executives buy iPhones that are essentially 60GB storage devices that run on Open BSD and allow third-party applications," he said. "Defending the device is going to be a losing war, and even if you try to do that, people will inevitably add to the device or change its configuration." While it unsurprising that Dunkelberger advocates the use of encryption as an intelligent way to overcome the complexity of changing IT infrastructure and business demands of defending data, he said that problems are most often related to faulty policies, not the types of technologies used for information protection. The heightened information security atmosphere of today isn't as much a result of the rapid growth of mobile computing or shared infrastructure between companies, but rather an issue of poor data architecture from the top down, he said. "Unless we start having a comprehensive discussion about the defense of data, the problem will only continue to persist, and not just in relation to hackers or compliance," Dunkelberger said. "Everyone has policies, but it is interesting how much intellectual property is being targeted and stolen despite that; more of these attacks are coming, and that will only increase costs and complexity if handled improperly because these are the crown jewels of the organizations that are being targeted," he said.