By Tom S. Noda
December 1, 2007

Companies, large and small, are gearing up for more effective and adequate IT security measures as they realize that threats emanating from the Internet are very real and very destructive.

In the recent Computerworld Philippines Executive Briefing on “IT Security: Protecting Your Information,” IT executives of companies share some of their future IT security plans and projects after learning about the latest trends on IT security at the forum.

Among the two main plans of IT heads interviewed by Computerworld are to acquire new IT security products and eliminate security breaches within their firms.

“The threat is real,” says Manolo Manuzon, IT manager of eBusiness Services Inc., a company engaged in the financial industry business. Realizing this, he says he plans to change the company’s IT security firewall and purchase other security products to protect the company’s business which has 153 branches in the Philippines.

Expressing the same concern, Lilia Chua-Solis, system manager of Green Cross Inc., says her company intends to improve its IT security controls by identifying the security holes and putting in place defensive measures.

“We’ve attended other security forums but we need to keep ourselves updated.” She says. “It’s budget time, so we like to see what products we can put in for our plans for next year.”

Lieutenant Jr. Grade Ariel Nicomedes-Torres, commanding officer of information systems group of the Philippine Navy, says his IT group’s main concern is how to improve on computer forensics, such as determining the possible attacks as well as pinpointing the points of entry.

“When it comes to IT security talks, we always run and attend,” Nicomedes-Torres says.

The navy officer adds they are currently assessing the Philippine Navy’s resources namely on training sets, skills sets, human resources and financial budget before coming up with a new IT security project.

“Our plan is to clean the infrastructure, beginning with the structuring of cables and to put up good quality servers,” Nicomedes-Torres says.

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The participants applauded the IT security forum describing it as “informative, encompassing, and knowledge fattening.”

“It left very indelible information both from the non-techie and techie audiences,” says Nicomedes-Torres.

For Chua-Solis, she found the meeting to have a good blend of speakers both on the sale side and technical matters.

“My favorite talk was Jun Malacaman’s (vice president of the Information Systems Society of the Philippines) because it covered a lot of areas in security, but it also focused properly on what we, as managers, would want to have our security settings to be,” Chua-Solis says.

Greencross, she shares, uses firewalls and anti-virus software but what the company plans to improve on is more about implementation and to set up a good security statement. “We are always on our toes on what we can implement and do to strengthen security.”

Mizon says he agrees with Malacaman since the latter’s lecture on IT security tackled the basics, stressing on the neglected but very important matters such as policy issues.

“They (policies) are very important, especially for us—the users—sometimes we are the culprits,” he says. “We tend to neglect that security, first and foremost, comes from the users inside the company.”

He says eBusiness Services have firewall, anti-virus and Trend Micro suite malware in place but still looks for other security packages.

Meanwhile, Nicomedes-Torres says he liked the presentations made by speakers from Symantec, Trend Micro, and Raynetworks. “Their talk was more technical and sometimes it’s good to consume technical information.”

The navy officer cited the talks on zero-hour attacks and some detailed reports and figures as very educational and was glad to be updated about them. He learned, for instance, there are already about 750,000 laptops stolen worldwide and believes its is a growing concern.

“With just one laptop, it could contain massive information. And especially for us soldiers, since we are in the defense business, what if one soldier loses his laptop? Then our security is automatically threatened,” he says.

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