The shift to smartphones and tablets makes it nearly impossible t0 secure on a per device basis. Employees may use 40 different services. How do you protect yourself in that kind of world?

Wikibon’s  Dave Vellante:

Security is rapidly becoming a ‘do-over’ because of the cloud. For years we’ve spent far too much money on protecting against malware and it has cost organizations many hundreds of billions of dollars. CIOs are looking for a better answer for the cloud because security is the major barrier to adoption. It’s jump ball in this field in that you can’t just apply the standard security techniques to the cloud. In the physical world we could put up a moat around the castle to protect the queen. But in the virtual world the queen wants to leave her castle which completely alters the data protection paradigm. Services organizations are a key ingredient to re-architecting security for this new world and those that get in first will have an advantage.

EMC Consulting believes that out of this world is the need to develop entirely new practices for managing data with a new set of consulting services that center around mobile security. Today the company is announcing what looks like a classic example of this race to the middle that we use a theme in the development of this blog.

The news centers around five new advisory services:

• Trusted Cloud Advisory Services: Identity is the big issue here. Companies use such a variety of services that they need a better way than user name and passwords for security. Companis need new security methods such as predictive analytics and single sign on solutions especially as they build out elastic infrastructures in both the public and the private cloud.
• Information Governance : EMC sees an opportunity for companies to consolidate infrastructure and uses that excess infrastructure for new services. If organizations can better understand the fluid nature of its data then it can design accordingly and build infrastructure that gives ways to compete.

EMC will  also offer services for governance, risk, and compliance; fraud and identity management and mobile device security.

Services Angle

EMC Consulting is building out a practice fort he post-PC era but with the classic checks and balances that we see from the largest technology companies. The Web world is fast upon the enterprise but EMC knows that few companies know the landscape well enough to manage the proliferation of devices and multiple identities people use when accessing cloud services.

EMC’s pillar of strength is in its security roots. It has hundreds of security professionals with experience in the field to offer expertise people need. But is this the right approach? New service providers are offering dynamic data fabrics that provide customers with a security infrastructure that can protect them from malware and other threats. Do customers need more people or tools to combat threats? That to me is the burning question for EMC as it builds out its manpower with these new security services and continues with that race to the middle.