That's the message from Kenneth Corriveau, CIO of Omnicom Media Group, which provides media and advertising support for the likes of Apple and Nissan, and who Infosecurity spoke with yesterday evening.
According to Corriveau, whose IT system perimeter is defended by a Network Access Control (NAC) system from ForeScout Technologies, the strategy to beat the latest malware threats is to adopt a multi-layered security strategy that defends the corporate network at several levels.
"Our problem is that we have a global network and this means that an attack in, say, Asia, could affect our offices around the world", he told Infosecurity.
"If you go back to 2002, our IT defence strategy was a federated one, with different offices defending their own systems. Now we're in 2010 and we have a homogeneous network. It's a global network that needs high levels of security", he said.
As a result, he added, you need to develop IT security strategies to defend the network as a whole, rather than defending specific sections or offices.
"We spotted Zeus a few weeks ago. My brother works at [deleted] and they have been hit by the worm. This got me worried, but it seems that the ForeScout system can protect us from the worm", he explained.
Corriveau says that the decision to go down the network perimeter defence security route is one that he and his team took some three to four years ago, when it became apparent that the old 'federated' approach needed to be updated.
"We also started to notice that new threats were coming in the shape of social networking sites like Facebook, which more and more people were starting to use", he said.
"Our observations are that a single IT security platform is no longer enough. You have to adopt a multi-layered strategy if you are to defend your IT systems effectively", he added.
"It's also worth remembering that, whilst you may have large offices with several hundred users, you also have smaller offices with, say, 15 users and no local IT support. If you take a global network security strategy, this is not a problem."