Are Security Devices Making Us Lazy? : Part 1 : Introduction

Let me clarify before I begin... by "us" I mean IT as a community, not information security specifically. Now that I have that out of the way let's discuss how our reliance on network firewalls, application firewalls, VPNs, encryption, etc. have caused system administrators, architects, programmers, and yes, even us security-type-folk lazy. Let me explain a bit.

Let's pretend for a moment that we didn't have AV, network firewalls, SSL, IDS, or any other security-specific solutions available to us. How would we design our information systems? How would we protect resources? How could we possibly defend our networks against attack? These are the questions I like to ask myself when I have to design a new security architecture, review a proposed design, or audit an existing system.

I am not saying we should design all of our systems with these questions in mind. I understand the fact that we have these wonderful network and system security tools at our disposal. Thus, we can adapt our architectures, designs, and programs to include these solutions. The problem I see is an over-reliance on these tools. As an industry we have moved away from pushing most of the security work to the system administrators and programmers. We have told them (implicitly) "Don't worry about it... we've got it covered."

So how do we fix it? How do IT professionals stop relying on “things” and start building security from the ground-up? How do we do this while increasing functionality, ease-of-use, and speed? In future installments of this series I will attempt to look at where IT professionals can focus their energies to begin “spreading the gospel” to the developers and administrators and have them buy into the idea of secure system from the start.