The state of security

The information security train has been running at 100 miles per hour for a few years now - unfortunately, though, we're going in reverse. The security market first focused on the perimeter, firewalls, and antivirus technologies, determined to keep the bad stuff from entering the infrastructure, only to then consider the network, with the logical sequence thus leading to protecting applications. However, the sole reason that information technology exists is to lever the critical asset - data. Security, as we define it, is data and network integrity - the protection of and access to the data. Ideally, security should have started with placing the protection as close to the assets (data) as possible, not the opposite; Folks, we got it backwards.