How Do You Secure an Environment Without a Perimeter? Using Emerging Technology Processes to Support Information Security Efforts in an Agile Data Center

Abstract

Cloud computing has transformed businesses, enabling agile and cost-effective IT infrastructure. The critical problem is that these new opportunities resulted in a co-mingled architecture which is difficult to secure. Based on interviews with boards of directors and executive leadership teams facing these new environments, our research question was: How do we secure increasingly dynamic architecture in an environment without a perimeter? The research involved an in-depth exploration of this problem using a survey instrument and interviews with 204 executives from 80 companies throughout 2014. From this work we developed an information security framework for executives in this new environment.