Limitations of CISCO SAFE Reference Architecture

Over the last years, there has been a tremendous change in the network infrastructure. Most of the organizations have adopted one of such kinds of innovation referred as CISCO SAFE reference architecture (Gai, Salli, and Andersson, 2010). Presently, this architecture is regarded as one of the best security architecture in the market due to its capacity to hold several network elements. Nevertheless, from security standpoint, as these technologies continue to evolve, several new and complex challenges continue to emerge. This security approach is limited in its ability to effectively secure and support most of the business transformations thus leaving most of these resources unprotected and preventing the deployment of the new services. Therefore, this paper will take the opportunity to analyze critically the various limitations of the approach and provide the reasonable recommendations on how to use the application. Despite its improved security protocol, this network is prone to the Intranet data center attacks. It has been noted with a great concern that the attack vectors have moved quite higher in their attack system to aim directly on the important elements of the Intranet data center. These vectors comprise of unauthorized access to the infrastructure that may lead to interruption or loss of the data. These vectors majorly attack the HTTP, SQL and XML of the architecture thus rendering the entire infrastructure useless (Gai, Salli, and Andersson, 2010). Second, it has been noted that the campus of the architecture may sometimes be threatened. This always occurs through data disruption and modification, data leak and network abuse. Such limitation often affects the overall operation of the architecture. DocWiki (2014) in his work, noted that a majority of the organization have also failed to use the architecture to secure common threats that may affect security. Instead, they have continued to aim at high-profile threats. For instance, they often forget the need of switching off unused ports to prevent any form of insider abuse and misuse. They fail to adhere to their role as important partners in risk management on the firm. This approach continues to expose them to a number of security threats that attacks the CISCO SAFE. On the other hand, Headquarters (2009) discovered that internet edge of the CISCO-SAFE is usually exposed to a large array of external threats. These threats include, network intrusion, web based phishing, viruses and other spyware. Further, the application attacks such as cross scripting and other unauthorized network intrusion are quite common in this architecture. Finally, most of these organizations lack the essential foundation of intelligent security policy that is necessary for protecting the firm. In most cases, these firms either completely lack reasonable security policies or ignore them hence exposing their vulnerability to a number of threats (Kim and Na, 2016).