If you were holding your breath for tech stocks to hit bottom and turn around, last week finally offered some good news in the form of earnings reports from AOL Time Warner, Apple Computer, Celestica, Extreme Networks, IBM and Microsoft, just to name a few. While everyone has been focusing on the economic consequences of this very painful market correction, what has been largely overlooked is the resulting institutional bedlam, which could prove to be much harder to repair over the long run. The dot-com shakeout has wiped out not just a lot of companies and jobs, along with a few personal fortunes, but huge portions of the network's institutional memory as well. Many of the resulting holes are going to keep more than a few I-managers awake at night for many months to come. Both scenarios are ripe for security disasters.
ASPs often provide crucial portions of the security on which their customers depend.
Many site developers and hosting services were among the second wave of business failures set in motion by the dot-com shakeout. In the resulting turmoil, huge caches of crucial information about ongoing operations have been lost to client enterprises. In addition, there is the problem of client information, much of it of a private nature, being declared a disposable asset in bankruptcy proceedings. So far, the issue has been addressed primarily from the standpoint of privacy concerns, but it's inevitable that the uncontrolled sale of such data could also pose a potent security risk for clients, partners and even vendors, as well as for the bankrupt dot-com itself. Finally, layoffs, too, threaten to take their toll on enterprise security.