Firewalls Passé?

John Arquilla, professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, recently served as a national security specialist-advisor for the Obama campaign.

Speaking with Wired magazine, Dr. Arquilla makes that case that “we should be putting an end to our primary reliance on firewalls.” Wow. Why?

Dr. Arquilla believes that “smart opponents will always find their way into any static system.”

So what can we do to protect our information assets? “The key to defense, then, is to use strong encryption all the time, and to protect data by cloaking it and storing most of it in the ‘cloud’ of cyberspace.”

Global Data Vault agrees that strong encryption is an essential component of proper security. We also believe that the cloud is usually a safer place for data because economies of scale allow cloud providers to invest in prevention, detection and testing.

That said, we’re keeping our firewalls.

The question I’d ask, for IT management and IT consultants who serve small to medium businesses, is what are the best and most practical means you have used to protect - with and without encryption - Exchange, SQL Server and Windows file system files?