Liquid Security: Eliminating Traditional Boundaries
You may be reading this on your desktop PC during business hours. Or from your MacBook at the local Starbucks just before closing. Or perhaps on your BlackBerry in the balcony at the Sunday matinée.
Time, place and platform are all liquid properties and therefore irrelevant in the digital enterprise. So says Liquid Security: Digital Trust When Time, Place and Platform Don’t Matter (PDF, 3.0MB), the fifth of eight volumes in which CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF) examines digital trust, a strategy for enhancing business value while addressing information risks. Liquid Security examines the importance of digital trust technologies for the liquid enterprise, including examples of organizations that are already becoming "liquid" and reaping value with liquid security.
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Smaller wireless devices = greater chance for value "Liquid security is a special kind of digital trust," explains Ron Knode, the report’s lead researcher and IT security expert. "It’s digital trust that doesn’t depend on any assumptions about the clock, geography or equipment involved." From Bluetooth to Wi-Fi to WiMAX and beyond, wires are disappearing, along with traditional digital trust techniques.
And with computers everywhere we turn — in cars, power systems, air conditioners and TVs — our daily lives are filled with value payoffs made possible by liquid security, along with real dangers whenever it is absent. The tasks we need to accomplish can be done on many different kinds of devices.
According to the report, three core business strategies drive an enterprise to become liquid:
• Mobility for All — No hunting for your phone or heading to the library to do research. • Consolidated Infrastructure — A single network can handle all your digital data applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, phone calls, e-mail, Webinars and Internet access. • Distributed Workforce — Employees work from anywhere, at any time, with almost any set of convenient tools.
While the resultant business payoffs are huge, those values will be realized only if these strategies are supported by liquid security.
"I used to carry a big old laptop," says Knode. "And, I used to plug it into network outlets and run enterprise mandated operating environments. Now I’m carrying a high-powered smart phone. Everything’s getting tinier and tinier, yet I’m still doing things I used to be able to do. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the application."
You may be reading this on your desktop PC during business hours. Or from your MacBook at the local Starbucks just before closing. Or perhaps on your BlackBerry in the balcony at the Sunday matinée. 
