Ray Ozzie, writing at his blog Ozzie.net, captured the essence of a vision, saying “We’re moving toward a world of 1) cloud-based continuous services that connect us all and do our bidding, and 2) appliance-like connected devicesenabling us to interact with those cloud-based services.” His succinct statement captured an end state we are all moving towards. One of the things that has slowed our progress towards that goal is security.
All enterprises today are concerned with secure access. Enterprise users must be given access to enterprise resources and must also be given the power to interact with all the richness of the Internet. And increasingly they must do this while mobile.
IronKey has been fielding key components of an architecture designed to enable this, and now as part of a team with Lockheed Martin they are fielded comprehensive solutions made to be enterprise ready. This is a secure PC on a stick that houses your operating system, applications and data on a trusted, self-contained USB flash drive.
A review of IronClad can be found at: http://techland.com/2010/11/17/ironclad-a-tiny-secure-computer-in-your-pocket/
As an enterprise concept, consider the contributions to the end to end security infrastructure that IronClad can make. Security professionals everywhere understand the importance of the strategy of defense in depth. IronClad can form a key part of this defense by ensuring user devices are not vulnerable to attack. They also contribute to protection of enterprise data and contribute to governance since only authorized applications will run in this environment.
Our concept evaluation site CTOlabs.com has previously written about the need for enhancing computer security by two orders of magnitude. With IronKey this seems to be a bit more possible. But, of course, the standard caveats apply: No defense is perfect. Response options are required. And defense in depth is the only strategy that holds a chance of protecting the enterprise from unmitigatable surprise.