The Security Business “Has No Future,” IBM Exec Says
Forget security. The real future is in creating sustainable businesses, says Val Rahmani, general manager of IBM ISS and of security and privacy for IBM Global Technology Services.

According to an article by Kelly Jackson Higgins on the Dark Reading website, Rahmani made the remarks last week at the RSA Conference 2008. She told attendees that IBM is getting out of the security business and is looking to creating sustainable businesses.

“The security industry is flying by the seat of its pants,” Rahmani told attendees. “Security infrastructure has been dictated by the bad guys... as new threats arise, we put new products in place. This is an arms race we cannot win.”

Instead, Rahmani said we should focus on business sustainability, which is all about building security into systems and processes. “If we really want to get ahead of the threat, we need to start thinking about re-engineering our businesses and processes. We need to make them more secure and compliant by design, and we need to move more security and compliance technologies into the fabric of our standard infrastructure and application environments."

Rahmani also talked about how the industry is in another transformational period, much like when PC emerged 25 years ago, and then LANs and WANs 20 years ago. “Ten years ago, it was the emergence of Internet-based computing. Today, it is the advent of secure Internet-based computing,” she said.