In a few weeks the security industry will be gathering for its annual RSA (News - Alert) big bash at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event for reasons you see in the headlines, and more for reasons you do not, is more popular than ever.  Reality is that risk management is right up there with getting and keeping customers and creating differentiated sustainable profitable value on C-level priority lists around the world. Let’s face it, keeping up with the bad guys, be they external enemies or disgruntled employees, is hard work. They are sophisticated, work fast and cause enormous damage to mission critical assets and your brand in literally the blink of an eye.

This is why vigilance must be both 24/7/365, proactive as well as reactive, and state-of-the-art. It is why creating a “zero-day” plan to protect from cyber attacks wherever they occur be they external or internal requires adding superior visibility, agility and resilience to augment and improve your network security fortifications. Not being current is an invitation for those who wish you harm to test your readiness and exploit your weaknesses.

With this in mind, it is a good time to learn about best practices, and the types of actions you need to consider to truly mitigate the risks that in an online-centric world are increasingly the result of improperly protected networks. In fact, as a nice grounding in network security before you like myself are as Jimmy Buffett sings, “head’in out to San Francisco,” you can join me online for the webinar, “Cyber Barbarians at the Gate – Strategies for 21st Century Network Security Fortifications,” Wednesday, February 20, 2013 2:00 p.m. EDT. Presenting their thoughts on network security will be Gordon Beith, director of Product Management, and Leena Merciline, senior product manager at VSS Monitoring,  

While the name of the session is aimed to get your attention, the truth is that the cyber barbarians are not just at the gate but inside, and you need to insure they cannot compromise your network from performing securely and at peak performance. This is your opportunity to get educated on the internal and external forces driving the need for advanced network security fortifications. We are going to provide a look at recent threats and news around cyber attacks. In addition, the intent is to arm you with information and strategies that will enable your enterprise to:

• Architect Defense-in-Depth and proactively defend against advanced cyber attacks
• Rapidly evaluate and deploy best-of-breed security-in-series while keeping 99.999 percent up times
• Gain 100 percent link-layer network visibility across LAN, WAN and cloud boundaries
• Gain visibility in to SSL traffic, one of the greatest points of vulnerability for network security
• Add or remove in-line network security and performance acceleration tools with minimal change control and without network service downtime.
• Avoid oversubscribing or underutilizing network security and monitoring tools
• How VSS Monitoring (News - Alert) solutions benefit large enterprise network customers globally

Security is increasingly IT’s job. And, since the network is the life blood of the enterprise and the vehicle those with malicious intent use to spread their nastiness, is an easy target. But, it does not have to be a vulnerable one.