Review of "High-Assurance Design: Architecting Secure and Reliable Enterprise Applications by Clifford Berg," Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, $54.99, ISBN: 0321375777

George Hacken
2006 Queue  
Information technology systems are moving forward inexorably in every area of our daily lives. This affects our relations with administration and companies, as well as our leisure time. We no longer fi nd it strange to handle bureaucratic matters automatically instead of manually. Those of us who are IT professionals, however, know that, parallel to this forward movement, there is a constant, growing threat posed by failures in security, whether accidental or intentional. This results in a loss
more » ... of faith in IT systems, which can somehow produce a reduction in growth. We can affi rm, without a doubt, that this is the reason why e-commerce is not increasing as much as expected. One fi eld that is experiencing signifi cant growth is data storage. This is partly because of a desire to store more data, so we can subsequently perform intelligent searches and inquiries. Traditional fi le servers have been replaced by the modern SAN (storage area network) and NAS (network-attached storage). The problem of security affects these networks, and this is the subject of this book. Author Himanshu Dwivedi briefl y introduces these networks before addressing the issue. This is, perhaps, the weakest part of the book. The topic needs a longer introduction. In Parts 2 and 3 ("NAS Security" and "iSCSI Security"), the author deals with threats to the security of these systems in great detail. He provides plenty of examples, allowing readers to see the security failures in these systems. In Part 4, "Storage Defenses," the author offers solutions for creating safe and reliable SAN and NAS systems. In the last part of the book, "SAN/NAS Policies, Trends, and Case Studies," Dwivedi reviews the legislation relevant to these systems. This discussion is limited to North America, which is of little use to readers from other parts of the world. This book was written for a varied audience: mainly specialists in security and administrators of SANs and NAS systems. It will, however, also appeal to those interested in implementing these networks and help them to learn about their pros and cons. The work contains all that a demanding reader could want: a carefully prepared edition, clear examples and explanations, many graphs and diagrams, exercises, and
doi:10.1145/1142055.1142074 fatcat:aednsewoa5b63kpwd5rasc4vpa