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V. Rishi Kumar

NEW DELHI, March 3

THE fast pace of global changes has brought several challenges in the electronic space where security has become a matter of culture war.

This is no longer a single time fix but needs constant attention, according to Ms. Mary Ann Davidson, Chief Security Officer, Oracle Corporation.

Speaking on "Making security part of corporate DNA" here on Monday, Ms Davidson said research studies indicated that 90 per cent of the respondents surveyed detected computer security breaches within the last twelve months and about 80 per cent acknowledged financial losses due to computer breaches.

Ms. Davidson, who is on a brief visit to India, said that the Oracle Corporation was in the process of beta testing a security product for its server. This security product has been fully developed by the India Development Centre and is slated for release later this year.

In the Asia-Pacific region, several Governments have taken the lead in charting out security directives to ensure that best practices are in place. Citing the examples of Hong Kong, where personal data privacy Ordinance was in place, she said similar initiatives had been undertaken by Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The situation was no different in the European Union, wherein the provision prohibited transfer of personal information to other territories that do not have adequate data protection laws.

Explaining as to how important security had become for the corporate world, Ms. Davidson said that the insurance industry had designed new hacker insurance modules, which garner up to 25 per cent higher premiums for insecure and hard to secure systems.

The CSO of Oracle Corporation, who was a commissioned officer in the US Navy prior to taking up the assignment at Oracle, said that information security was needed now more than ever before. More and more people and the corporate world were worried about addressing this major concern.

Stating that the issue of security in a corporation actually boiled down to a matter of corporate culture which ultimately set the course for process, people, its plans as also policies, she said "You can't hire enough security police when you don't have systems in place."

One way Oracle is seeking to build on best practices over the years is take the support of a team of ethical hackers. "This team helps and assists the security team in developing the necessary mechanism and fixes to address these issues", she explained. For instance, in the US, Government sectors now required and preferred evaluated products. Here independent third party attestation of a vendor's security claims against security evaluation criteria was taken into consideration. Here mutual recognition allowed an evaluation done in one country to be accepted by any signatory.

Towards evaluation, Oracle has established Linux as a strategic evaluated platform wherein evaluation materials will be provided to larger open source community. This would be made public for use, she explained.

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