Saturday 28 March 2015

Importance of IT Security Solutions

This is information age comprising of all sorts of financial and corporate information, research and analysis reports, trends etc., and categorized as confidential, sensitive and critical. There are automation tools for extracting and gleaning information. There are management solution products such as content management, knowledge management and document management for managing the collected information. 

All of these have made IT security an indispensable tool that is essential in securing information from hackers. As soon as a computer system is hooked into the Internet, it is exposed to risks of various kinds. Email and web security has also become a mainstream component of modern business IT infrastructure, much like firewalls and anti-virus technology. Thankfully, there are various IT security solutions that have been developed to secure IT infrastructure from risks of all sorts.

 

 Internet Security Solutions

 

Security has also been one of the most critical design considerations of any Internet application since hackers increasingly probe connected computers for weaknesses in their security and can gain access to them easily. This could result in the stealing of confidential information without the user even realizing it. Trojan horse programs and Spyware come from seemingly innocent sources, such as email attachments and file downloads. Once the user launches them they can secretly send data including any sensitive personal or financial information stored on the PC and back out over the Internet. 

 

Some of the Internet security solutions are as follows:

 

Web-based redirector: Redirectors work only for web browsing wherein the user goes to the redirector web page and enters the website URL anonymously. The redirecting software then requests for the page using its own server IP and redirects the output to the user’s browser window.

Web Proxy: Using web proxy, open proxy IP address is found and set it in the user’s browser settings. All web traffic will be passed through the proxy, hiding the user’s real IP. However, checking the proxy for the anonymity before using it is essential.

SSH tunneling: Used as an additional service for the data security, SSH makes your connection to the proxy encrypted thus making it impossible to intercept.

 

Information Security

 

As technology advances, the importance of information security also grows parallel. However, it has become one of the hottest topics in the recent past owing to the Internet’s open design and its heightened usage along with rapid adoption of internetworking systems. As the number of potential targets grows, the sophistication of security threats is increasing.  Traditional security products such as virus scanners and firewalls may not be able to provide the required protection against unknown threats. The thousands of mutations and variations of Spyware and viruses available to hackers on the Internet make it difficult for such systems to be fully secure.

Threats and risks are constantly evolving and complete security against them can only be achieved by having complete control of the Internet connection including the ability to specify which applications, known and unknown, can be trusted to use the Internet. There are some intelligent defenses available against attacks, such as denial of service (DOS) attacks. Now, routers and other devices can be set to verify source addresses and ignore packets if they are bogus or carry a suspicious pattern. 

It is important to understand that IT Security is a lot more than just a software application that can be deployed. A good secured IT system should always have multiple levels of protection and authentication.