Big Blue Security Lessons For Small And Midsized Businesses?

IBM's planning on pumping a whopping (even for IBM) $1.5 billion into security research next year. Their target? You, me, our colleagues and employees.Developed over the past year-and-a-half, the massive security initiative promises to address five key areas of security vulnerability -- information itself, threats, applications, identity and access, and physical security.

Each of which is of course on all of our minds most if not all of the time.

But what makes IBM's discussion of these areas provocative is Big Blue's determination to address the "people problem." People, that is, doing things with technology that they shouldn't be doing.

"People," as IBM's director of corporate security strategy put it, "just screwing up."

Now, clearly, the research approach will focus on endpoint security and access control/management. Which is fine and vital and, one hopes, will produce insights and products that will quickly reach the small and midsize business market as well as IBM's enterprise-level customer base.

And if any of those insights and products actually should solve the problem of "people just screwing up," instead of simply limiting the tools on which they can commit their screwups, well, IBM's initials would stand for Incredible Business Miracle.