Resources for Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)

The big picture of network security

www.gcn.com

In the mid- 1990s, we watched business networking gradually move…onto the public Internet. Every business, every federal agency had a connection to the Internet. It wasn’t terribly mission-critical in those days. This is when the firewall was introduced. You had your enterprise network. People had a pretty good grasp of their largely private-line infrastructure. They had their set of carriers that they dealt with. And they had an Internet connection with a firewall. It felt very manageable. There wasn’t a great deal of complexity.

But over time, two things have happened: One is that the one Internet connection became thousands and thousands of connections. And second, that firewall has expanded to include intrusion-detection and -prevention systems, antivirus and anti-spam measures, [Web page] filtering, and threat management policies. Where is this all going?

We think the big mess that sits at every Internet gateway can be virtualized. When I say virtualized, I mean it can be pushed out onto the network.

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