Anyone who has worked with data-intensive computing and storage environments over the past five or so years has seen the quantity of sensitive data that organizations and enterprises carry on their servers and storage devices spiral upwards. Exponential growth in storage capacity, coupled with emerging regulatory requirements, has led to greater emphasis on storage network vulnerabilities.

Let's review the typical access control system in use today. Not only are the various components disconnected but they are from different manufacturers and do not and will not integrate with each other. Some use incompatible hardware, or proprietary, unsynchronized databases, or completely inconsistent user interfaces that compete for space and attention.

There's no stemming the tide of information; with more users and more servers and more connectivity than ever before, the task of logging, storing, and archiving all of that activity is astounding. The temptation may be to simply, save it all.

Following World War I, France's Minister of War and Veteran Affairs, Andre Maginot, convinced the French parliament to build a perimeter line of defense from Switzerland to the Mediterranean to prevent Germany from invading France through its previously exploited Eastern frontier.

As the role of IT administrators continues to expand, it is imperative that companies not lose sight of their core responsibilities: managing and protecting corporate data. This responsibility is becoming increasingly important in the enterprise due to the staggering rise in identity theft around the globe.

It's almost a tautology these days to say that the Internet has become the life blood for business and personal communications. E-commerce and e-mail are two resounding examples of the transformation exerted by the 'network of networks' on people around the globe.

With volumes of stored data growing seemingly without limits, organizations are struggling to meet their burgeoning storage demands. While the price of high-performance disk storage continues to drop, it is not dropping fast enough to accommodate the annual doubling of data in more data-intensive environments.

A recent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers confirmed that most security breaches occur in stored data. Exponential growth in storage capacity, coupled with emerging regulatory requirements, has led to an even greater increase in storage network vulnerabilities.