The stronger security posture means ERM is now more confident regarding its own development plans, especially for development of its online portals.
“Digital products and services will play an increasingly important role in our business, particularly given our focus to help customers better their energy requirements,” Timms says. “The STEP Online portal is a service that will develop further, so the knowledge that we can secure that is important. If we couldn’t guarantee that, we would be looking at hosting systems offsite at greater cost, or shying away from more development.”
Timms says Cisco’s cloud security roadmap is particularly interesting to ERM, particularly the possibility of running a virtualised IDS/IPS system in the cloud.
“We wanted to make sure we had complete visibility, because not all threats come in via the Internet,” Timms says.
“All it takes is someone to walk in and plug in an infected USB key. If that malware manages to propagate sideways through the network, we are going to see which other machines it has affected and be able to remediate them quite quickly.”
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