Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the rapidly increasing threat that
enterprises face from security breaches. In just the past year, the number of attacks are up, the costs associated with them are higher and more visible, and the risks of not securing systems and processes are therefore much greater. Some people have even called the rate of attacks a pandemic.The path to reducing these risks, even as the threats escalate, is to confront security at the framework and strategic level, and to harness the point solutions approach into a managed and ongoing security enhancement lifecycle.
As part of the series of recent news announcements from HP, we're here to examine how such a framework process can unfold, from workshops that allow a frank assessment of an organization’s vulnerabilities, to tailored framework-level approaches that can transform a company based on its own specific needs. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Here to describe how a fabric of technology, a framework of processes, and a lifecycle of preparedness can all work together to help organizations become more secure -- and stay secure -- is our guest. Please join me in welcoming Rebecca Lawson, Director of Worldwide Security Initiatives at HP. Welcome back, Rebecca.
Rebecca Lawson: Thank you. Nice to talk with you again.
Gardner: Rebecca, why now? Why has the security vulnerability issue come to a head?
Lawson: Open up the newspaper and you see another company getting hit almost every day. As
an industry, we've hit a tipping point with so many different security related issues -- for example, cyber crime, hacktivism, nation-state attacks. When you couple that with the diversity of devices that we use, and the wide range of apps and data we access every day, you can see how these dynamics create a very porous environment for an enterprise.So we are hearing from our customers that they want to step back and think more strategically about how they're going to handle security, not just for the short term, when threats are near and present, but also from a longer term point of view.
Gardner: What do you think are some of the trends that are supporting this vulnerability? I know you have some research that you've done. What are your findings? What's at work here that's making these hacktivists and these other nefarious parties successful?
For more detail on the the extent of security breaches, read the
Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study.
There are so many different points at which security incidents can occur; the real trick is getting your arms around all of them and focusing your attention on those that are most likely to cause reputation damage or financial damage or operational damage.
We also noticed in our research that the number of attacks, particularly on web applications, is just skyrocketing. One of the key areas of focus for HP is helping our customers understand why that’s happening, and what they can do about it.
Gardner: It also seems to me that, in the past, a lot of organizations could put up a walled
garden, and say, "We're not going to do a lot of web stuff. We're not going to do mobile. We're going to keep our networks under our control." But nowadays that’s really just not possible.If you're not doing mobile, not looking seriously at cloud, not making your workers able to access your assets regardless of where they are, you're really at a disadvantage competitively. So it seems to me that this is not an option, and that the old defensive posture just doesn’t work anymore.
Lawson: That is exactly right. In the good old days, we did have a walled garden, and it was easy for IT or the security office to just say “no” to newfangled approaches to accessing the web or building web apps. Of course, today they can still say no, but IT and security offices realize that they can't thwart the technology-related innovation that helps drive growth.
Our customers are keenly aware that their information assets are the most important assets now. That’s where the focus is, because that’s where the value is. The problem is that all the data and information moves around so freely now. You can send data in the blink of an eye to China and back, thru multiple application, where it’s used in different contexts. The context can change so rapidly that you have to really think differently about what it is you're protecting and how you're going to go about protecting it. So it's a different game now.
Gardner: And as we confront this "new game," it also appears that our former organizational approach is wanting. If we've had a variety of different security approaches under the authority of different people -- not really coordinated, not talking to each other, not knowing what the right hand and left hand are doing -- that’s become a problem.
So how do we now elevate this to a strategic level, getting a framework, getting a comprehensive plan? It sounds like that’s what a lot of the news you've been making these days is involved with.
No silver bullet
Lawson: You're exactly right. Our customers are realizing that there is no one silver bullet. You have to think across functional areas, lines of business, and silos.
Job number one is to bring the right people together and to assess the situation. The people are going to be from all over the organization -- IT, security and risk, AppDev, legal, accounting, supply chain -- to really assess the situation. Everyone should be not only aware of where vulnerabilities might be, or where the most costly vulnerabilities might be, but to look ahead and say, "Here is how our enterprise is innovating with technology -- Let's make sure we build security into them from the get-go."
There are two takeaways from this. One is that HP has a structured methodical framework approach to helping our customers get the people on the same page, getting the processes from top-down really well-structured so that everyone is aware of how different security processes work and how they benefit the organizations so that they can innovate.
One of the other elements is that every enterprise has to deal with a lot of short-term fixes.
One of the other elements is that every enterprise has to deal with a lot of short-term fixes. For example, a new vulnerability gets discovered in an application, and you've got to go quickly plug it, because it's relevant to your supply chain or some other critical process. That’s going to continue to go on.
But also, long term thinking, about building security in from the get-go; this is where companies can start to turn the corner. I'll go back again to web apps, building security into the very requirement and making sure all the way through the architecture design, testing, production, all the way through that you are constantly testing for security.
Gardner: So as you move toward more of a strategic approach to security, trying to pull together all these different threads into a fabric, you've identified four basic positions: assessment, optimization, management, and transformation. I'm curious, what is it about what you are coming out with in terms of process and technology that helps companies work toward that? What are the high-level building blocks?
Read more on HP's security framework
Rethinking Your Enterprise Security:
Critical Priorities to Consider
We help our customers first assess the situation, which is really important just to have all eyes on what's currently happening and where your current vulnerabilities may lie. Then, we help them to transform their security practices from where they are today to where they need to be.
Then, we have technologies and services to help them manage that on an ongoing basis, so that you can get more and more of your security controls automated. And then, we help them optimize that, because security just doesn't stand still. So we have tools and services that help our customers keep their eye on the right ball, as all of the new threats evolve or new compliance requirements come down the pike.
Gardner: I've also heard that you're providing better visibility, but at a more comprehensive level, something called the HP Secure Boardroom. Maybe you could help us better understand what that means and why that's important as part of this organizational shift?
Get more information on the executive dashboard:
Introducing the HP Secure Boardroom.
The result is that a CISO can look at a dashboard and instantly see what's going on all across the organization. What are the threats that are happening? What's the rate of incidents? What's going on across your planning spectrum?
To have the visibility into disparate systems is step one. We've codified this over the several years that we've been working on this into a system that now any enterprise can use to pull together a consistent C-level view, so that you have the right kind of transparency.
Half the battle is just seeing what's going on every day in a consistent manner, so that you are focused on the right issues, while discovering where you might need better visibility or where you might need to change process. The Secure Boardroom helps you to continually be focused on the right processes, the right elements, and the right information to better protect financial, operational, and reputation-related assets.
Gardner: Rebecca, this reminds me of some of the strength that HP has been developing over the years in systems management. I've been observing and following HP for over 20 years and I can remember doing briefings with HP on OpenView when it was a new product and a new approach to management.
When you think about vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks, the first thing you have to do is have the right visibility. We have technology in our security organization that helps us see and find the vulnerabilities really quickly.
Is there continuity here between the expertise and the depth and breadth that HP has developed in how to manage systems and now bringing that into how to make them secure and to provide automation and policies that can ensure security over time?
Lawson: Yes. And I cannot believe it's been 20 years. That's a great point. Because we've been in the systems management and business service management business for so long, I would elevate it up to the level of the business service management.
We already have a head start with our customers, because they can already see the forest for the trees with regard to any one particular service. Let's just say it's a service in the supply chain, and that service might comprise network elements and systems and software and applications and all kinds of data going through it. We're able to tie the management of that through traditional management tools, like what we had with OpenView and what we have with our business service management to the view of security.
When you think about vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks, the first thing you have to do is have the right visibility. We have technology in our security organization that helps us see and find the vulnerabilities really quickly.
Let's say there's an incident and our security technology identifies it as being suspect, maybe it's just a certain type of database entry that's suspect, because we can associate it with a known bad IP address, we can do that because we have a correlation engine that is looking at factors like bad reputations, DNS entries, and log files, pulling all this together, and mapping that to incidents.
So we can say that this one is really suspect, let's do something about that. It can then initiate an incident record, which then goes to change management, and goes all the way through to remediation. You say, "You know what, we're going to block that guy from now on." Or maybe something happened when you're doing patch management and a mistake happens, or there's some vulnerability that happened during the time frame that somebody was doing the patch.
Integration with operations
Because we have our security technology tied with IT operations, there is an integration between them. When the security technology detects something, they can automatically issue an alert that is picked up from our incident management system, which might then invoke our change management system, which might then invoke a prescribed operations change, and we can do that through HP Operations Orchestration.
For example, if a certain event occurs, we can automate the whole process to remediate that occurrence. In the case of patch management -- something went wrong. It might have been a human error. It doesn't matter -- what happens is that we've already anticipated a certain type of attack or mistake. That's a very long way of saying that we've tied our security technology to our IT operations, and by the way, also to our applications management.
It really is a triad -- security, applications, operations. At HP, we’re making them work together. And because we have such a focus now on data correlation, on Big Data, we're able to bring in all the various sources of data and turn that into actionable information, and then execute it through our automation engine.
Gardner: So the concept here, as with management, is that to find issues around reliability performance requires that über overview approach, and having access to all of these data points and then being able to manage change and portfolio management as well, and then of course the lifecycle of the applications comes into play.
But it strikes me, when I listen to you, that this isn't really a security technology story, it's really a story about a comprehensive ability to manage your IT operations. Therefore, this is not just a bolt-on, something that one or two companies add as a new product to the market. So what differentiates HP? It doesn't strike me that there are not many companies that can pull this all together?
We can't say no to technology, because that's the engine of what makes an enterprise grow and be competitive.
Lawson: That's very true. As I mentioned, there is no one silver bullet. It's a matter of how you pull all the little pieces together and make sense of them.
Every organization has to innovate. We know that technology accelerates innovation. We can't say no to technology, because that's the engine of what makes an enterprise grow and be competitive. Everything new that's created has security already built-in, so that there is no delay down the road, and this is particularly germane in the applications area, as we were mentioning earlier.
Gardner: Rebecca, I've also heard you mention something called the "fabric of technology," and I know you've got a lot of announcements from ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint brands within HP. People can look to the news reports and get more information in detail on those particular announcements. But how does the technology news and that concept of a fabric come into play here?
Lawson: Well, let me use an example. Let's say one of your business services is a composite service and you may be using some outside cloud services and some internal services in your SAP system. Because all of the business processes tend to be built on composite technology-based services, you have to have the right fabric of security provision that’s guarding that process so nothing happens in all the various places where it could happen.
For example, we have a technology that lets you scan software and look for vulnerabilities, both dynamic and static testing. We have ways of finding vulnerabilities in third-party applications. We do that through our research organization which is called DVLabs. DV stands for Digital Vaccine. We pull data in from them every day as to new vulnerabilities and we make that available to the other technologies so we can blend that into the picture.
Focused technology
The right kind of security fabric has to be composed of different technologies that are very focused on certain areas. For example, technologies like our intrusion protection technology, which does the packet inspection and can identify bad IP addresses. They can identify that there are certain vulnerabilities associated with the transaction, and they can stop a lot of traffic right at the gate before it gets in.
The reason we can do that so well is because we've already weaved in information from our applications group, information from our researchers out there in the market. So we've been able to pull these together and make more value out of them working as one.
Another example is all of this information then can weave into our security, intelligence, and risk management platform, which is underpinned by our ArcSight technology, Fortify technology, and Tipping Point as well. We can do rigorous analysis and correlation of what would otherwise be very disparate data points.
So not only can we stop things right at the gate with our filters on our IPS, but we can do the analysis that says there's a pattern that's not looking good. Luckily we have built and bought technology that all works together in concert, and that lets you focus on the most critical aspects of keeping your enterprise running.
Gardner: We've talked about assessment. We've talked about change of processes and strategic and framework level activities. We've talked about the boardroom view and how this follows some of the concepts of doing good IT systems management, but we are also of course in the cloud era.
A lot of people think that when the words cloud and security are next to each other, bad things happen, but in fact, that’s not always the case.
I'm curious as to how organizations that may not want to actually do more of this over time themselves, but look for others who are in fact core competency focused on security start doing it. Is there a path toward security as a service or some sort of a managed service hybrid model that we're now going to be moving to as well?
Lawson: Absolutely. A lot of people think that when the words cloud and security are next to each other, bad things happen, but in fact, that’s not always the case.
Once an enterprise has the right plan and strategy in place, they start to prioritize what parts of their security are best suited in-house, with your own expertise, or what parts of the security picture can you or should you hand off to another party. In fact, one of our announcements this week is that we have a service for endpoint threat management.
If you're not centrally managing your endpoint devices, a lot of incidents can happen and slip through the cracks -- everything from an employee just losing a phone to an employee downloading an application that may have vulnerabilities.
So managing your endpoints devices in general, as well as the security associated with the endpoints, make a lot of sense. And it’s a discrete area where you might consider handing the job to a managed services provider, who has more expertise as well as better economic incentives.
Application testing
Another great example of using a cloud service for security is application testing. We are finding that a lot of the web apps out in the market aren't necessarily developed by application developers who understand that there's a whole lifecycle approach involved.
In fact, I've been hearing interesting statistics about the number of web apps that are written by people formerly known as webmasters. These folks may be great at designing apps, but if you're not following a full application lifecycle management practice, which invokes security as one of the base principles of designing an app, then you're going to have problems.
What we found is that this explosion of web apps has not been followed closely enough by testing. Our customers are starting to realize this and now they're asking for HP to help, because in fact there are a lot of app vulnerabilities that can be very easily avoided. Maybe not all of them, but a lot of them, and we can help customers do that.
So testing as a service as a cloud service or as a hosted or managed service is a good idea, because you can do it immediately. You don't incur the time and money to spin up a testing of center of excellence – you can use the one that HP makes available through our SaaS model.
Gardner: As part of your recent announcements, moving more toward a managed services provider role, is something that you are working on yourselves at HP and you are also enabling your ecosystem partners. Perhaps we can wrap up with a little bit more detail about what you are going to be offering as services in addition to what you are offering as professional services and products.
One of the great things about many of the technologies that we've purchased and built in the last few years is that we're able to use them in our managed services offerings.
Lawson: One of the great things about many of the technologies that we've purchased and built in the last few years is that we're able to use them in our managed services offerings.
I'll give you an example. Our ArcSight product for Security Information and Event Management is now offered as a service. That's a service that really gets better the more expertise you have and the more focused you are on that type of event correlation and analysis. For a lot of companies they just don't want to invest in developing that expertise. So they can use that as a service.
We have other offerings, across testing, network security, endpoint security, that are all offered as a service. So we have a broad spectrum of delivery model choices for our customers. We think that’s the way to go, because we know that most enterprises want a strategic partner in security. They want a trusted partner, but they're probably not going to get all of their security from one vendor of course, because they're already invested.
We like to come in and look first at establishing the right strategy, putting together the right roadmap, making sure it's focused on helping our customer innovate for the future, as well as putting some stopgap measures in so that you can thwart the cyber threats that are near and present danger. And then, we give them the choice to say what's best for their company, given their industry, given the compliance requirements, given time to market, and given their financial posture?
There are certain areas where you're going to want to do things yourself, certain areas where you are going to want to outsource to a managed service. And there are certain technologies already at play that are probably just great in a point solution context, but they need to be integrated.
Integrative approach
Most of our customers have already lots of good things going on, but they just don't all come together. That's really the bottom line here. It has to be an integrative approach. It has to be a comprehensive approach. And the reason is that the bad guys are so successful causing havoc is that they know that all of this is disconnected. They know that security technologies tend to be fragmented and they're going to take advantage of that.
Gardner: You've had a lot of news come out, and we've talked about an awful lot today. Is there a resource that you could point to that folks can go and perhaps get a more detailed, maybe in one spot, a security wellspring perhaps? What would you suggest?
Lawson: I'd definitely suggest going to hp.com/go/enterprisesecurity. In particular, there is a report that you can download and read today called the "HP DVLabs’ Cyber Security Risks Report." It’s a report that we generate twice a year and it has got some really startling information in it. And it’s all based on, not theoretical stuff, but things that we see, and we have aggregated data from different parts of the industry, as well as data from our customers that show the rate of attacks and where the vulnerabilities are typically located. It’s a real eye opener.
It’s a little startling, when you start to look at some of the facts about the costs associated with application breaches or the nature of complex persistent attacks.
So I would just suggest that you search for the DVLabs’ Cyber Security Risks Report and read it, and then pass it on to other people in your company, so that they can become aware of what the situation really is. It’s a little startling, when you start to look at some of the facts about the costs associated with application breaches or the nature of complex persistent attacks. So awareness is the right place to start.
Gardner: Very good. We've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how to confront security at the framework and strategic level and how to harness the point solutions approach into a managed and ongoing security enhancement lifecycle benefit.
We have been joined in our discussion today by Rebecca Lawson, Director of Worldwide Security Initiatives at HP. Thanks so much, Rebecca.
Lawson: Thank you so much, Dana. It’s great to talk to you.
Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the surge in security threats to enterprises and the approach companies need to take to thwart them. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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