NFL and College Football are in full swing this season. Coaching staffs spend an enormous amount of time building teams and implementing their defensive strategies that have the ability to react on each offensive confrontation. The offense continues to learn the defensive reactions to threats, and the defense continues to show different defensive strategies and alignments. The offense is constantly sending the defense false routes hoping the defense will spend as many resources as possible on a false attack. As the offense continues to progress toward the goal, the defense continues to strengthen their stance. Some of the fieriest battles are fought down in the Red Zone before the goal.
Information defensives should not only have strong perimeters, but as the offense gets closer to the goal line the defenses should get stronger and stronger showing a variety of defensive strategies. The defense should be interwoven into the business process and strategies. Many information defenses rely on strong perimeters but have softer controls near the goal where an attack could have the largest impact. It is key for the defense to work with business and data owners to know where the Red Zones defenses need to make goal line stance to prevent the business goals from being impacted. The defense needs to provide a variety of different looks, and offer their attackers false weaknesses to trigger alerts and trap their intruder into making a mistake. The defense needs to be layered - not having one line of scrimmage but layered lines of scrimmages that are configured differently using different players or defensive configurations. Information defensives have to detect not only outsider threats but insider threats from the outside in and from the inside out.
The problem is the information scrimmage is not played on one field, it is played concurrently on a number of fields throughout the world in a distributed environment 24 hours a day with a super highway running between the playing fields. The perimeter could be distributed in Beijing, Berlin, Dehli, or New York, with data flowing back and forth through multiple service providers. The perimeter is now PDA's on Broadband Networks where requests are sent to message services and relayed from worldwide information stores. Information security managers need to make the defensive strategy integrated with the business goals and processes. Information defensive strategies in business are equally as critical as those defensive strategies integrated in college and professional sports.
It's x's and o's, ones and zeros, check and checkmate.
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