News Briefs

ATIS has formed the Information and Data Security (IDS) Committee, a new standards group that will identify and address information and data security topics specific to the communications industry. “The increasing amounts of customer and business data that must be secured and maintained is placing a growing importance on the need for privacy and protection protocols in information technology organizations across the telecommunications industry,” says Susan Miller, president and CEO of ATIS. “The ATIS CIO Council identified data security and compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) as two of its top priorities for 2006. The IDS is the ideal venue to ensure best practices are identified and standards are developed to organize and secure key customer and business databases.” Initial IT security activities will include the development of a data privacy and protection white paper focused on industry-specific concerns and potential solution alternatives; the completion of a security strength analysis survey that will be used to determine areas on which to focus development of best practices; and the completion of a taxonomy of existing security standards and development of a method whereby carriers can address security issues using a standard reference model. With respect to SOX issues, the initial IDS focus includes a review of logical access best practices to develop requirements to be used for a technological solution; a review and comparison of audit practices to minimize the impact/cost of testing; and the development of a compliance synchronization white paper that includes an accountability matrix, recommendations regarding the roles of compliancy personnel within an organization, and information regarding segregation of duties related to logical access.

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XO Communications Inc. recently began selling Perimeter Email Protection (PEP), its new e-mail security and e-mail disaster recovery service. The new service expands the existing XO e-mail and hosting service delivery platform to provide businesses with increased e-mail security and optimal mail server performance, and helps combat increasing costs associated with junk e-mail, DoS attacks and viruses spreading on the Internet. According to a survey released last year by the University of Maryland, the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity has reached more than $21 billion annually.

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The VPN services market took in a whopping $23 billion in 2005 and is expected to grow another 22 percent to hit $29 billion in 2009, according to Infonetics Research. Meanwhile, the managed security services market grew to nearly $5 billion in 2005 and is forecast to jump 68 percent to $8 billion in 2009. The research firm’s new report “VPN and Security Services” indicates both markets are increasingly lucrative due to increased worldwide deployment of MPLS and the complexity of deploying VPN and security solutions. “The number and variety of attacks affecting most organizations is increasing at an alarming rate, and the technologies needed to effectively combat all of the possible attacks are simply too difficult for many organizations to deploy themselves,” says Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for VPNs and security at Infonetics Research. “In particular, attacks aimed at specific types of content (from business applications like Oracle and SAP to instant messenger traffic) are wreaking havoc on organizations — and not just big companies; companies of all sizes are being affected.”

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Orange Business Services recently unleashed intrusion prevention services to protect multinational companies from network vulnerabilities. This security solution, created by Orange Business Services using security devices from Juniper Networks Inc., offers 24/7 surveillance, monitoring and response from one of five global security operations centers located in Atlanta, London, Montreal, Rennes, France and Sydney. This coverage allows multinational companies to have access to their intrusion prevention service with homogeneous support, offering the same service level worldwide.

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Arsenal Digital Solutions USA Inc. has expanded its suite of online backup and recovery services with two services designed specifically for the consumer and SMB markets.

Links

Arsenal Digital Solutions USA Inc. www.arsenaldigital.com ATIS www.atis.org Infonetics Research www.infonetics.com Juniper Networks Inc. www.juniper.net Orange Business Services www.orange-business.com Perimeter Internetworking www.perimeterusa.com XO Communications Inc. www.xo.com