Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how increased and more sophisticated
attacks are forcing enterprises to innovate and expand security
practices to not only detect, but predict system intrusions.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Follow the HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the
HP Discover Performance Podcast Series. I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your moderator for this ongoing discussion of
IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.
Once again, we're focusing on how IT leaders are
improving security and reducing risk as they adapt to the new harsh
realities of doing business online.
I'm now joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast series,
Paul Muller, Chief Software Evangelist at HP Software. Welcome back, Paul. How are you today?
Paul Muller: Dana, very well. It's great to be back, and I'm looking forward to today’s conversation.
Gardner: Yes, we have a big discussion today. We're joined by HP’s Global
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
to learn about how some of the very largest global enterprises like HP
are exploring all of their options for doing business safely and
continuously. So with that, let's welcome our guest,
Brett Wahlin, Vice President and Global CISO at HP. Welcome, Brett. [Disclosure:
HP is a sponsor of
BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Brett Wahlin: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Brett, there's been a lot of discussion, of course, about
security and a lot of discussion about
big data. I'm very curious as to how these are related.
It
seems to me that I've read and heard quite a bit about how big data can
be used to improve security and provide insights into what's going on
within systems and even some greater
analysis
capabilities. Is that what you're finding and hearing from other CISOs
-- that there is a great tool in big data that’s related to security?
Wahlin:
Yes, big data is quite an interesting development for us in the field
of security. If we look back on how we used to do security, trying to
determine where our enemies were coming from, what their capacities
were, what their targets were, and how we're gathering intelligence to
be able to determine how best to protect the company, our resources were
quite limited.
We've found that through
the use of big data, we're
now able to start gathering reams of information that were
never available to us in the past. We tend to look at this almost in
a modern-warfare type of perspective.
If you're a
battlefield commander, and you're looking at how to deploy defenses, how
would you deploy those offenses, and what would be the targets that
your enemies are looking for? You typically then look at gathering
intelligence. This intelligence comes through multiple sources, whether
it's electronic or human signals, and you begin to process the
intelligence that's gathered, looking for insights into your enemy.
Moving defenses
This
could be the enemy’s capabilities, motivation, resourcing, or targets.
Then, by that analysis of that intelligence, you can go through a
process of moving your defenses, understanding where the targets may be,
and adjusting your troops on the ground.
Big
data has now given us the ability to collect more intelligence from
more sources at a much more rapid pace. As we go through this, we're
looking at understanding these types of questions that we would ask as
if we were looking at direct adversaries.
We're
looking at what these capabilities are, where people are attacking from,
why they're attacking us, and what targets they're looking for within
our company. We can gather that data much more rapidly through the use
of big data and apply these types of analytics.
We
begin to ask different questions of the data and, based on the type of
questions we're asking, we can come up with some rather interesting
information that we never could get in the past. This then takes us to a
position where that advanced analytics allows us to almost predict
where an enemy might hit.
That’s in the future, I
believe. Security is going from the use of prevention, where I'm
tackling a known bad thing, to the point where I can use big data to
analyze what's happening in real time and then predict where I may be
attacked, by whom, and at what targets. That gives me the ability to
move the defenses around in such a way that I can protect the high-value
items, based on the intelligence that I see coming in through the
analytics that we get out of big data.
Muller: Brett, you talk a lot about the idea of getting
in front of the problem. Can you talk a little bit about your point of
view on how security, from your perspective as a practitioner, has
evolved over the last 10-15 years?
Wahlin:
Certainly. That’s a great question. Years ago, we used to be about
trying to prevent the
known bad from happening. The questions we would
ask would always be around, can it happen to us, and if it does, can we
respond to it? What we have to look at now is the fact that the question
should change. It should be not, "Can it happen to us," but "When is it
going to happen to us?" And not, "Can we respond to it," but "How can
we survive it?"
If we look at that type of a mind-shift
change, that takes us back to the old ways of doing security, where you
try to prevent, detect, and respond. Basically, you prevented the known
bad things from happening.
This went back to the days of -- pick your favorite attack from years ago. One that I remember is very telling. It was
Code Red,
and we weren’t prepared for it. It hit us. We knew what the signature
looked like and we were able to stop it, once we identified what it was.
That whole preventive mechanism, back in the day, was pretty much what
people did for security.
Fast forward several years,
and you get into that new era of security threats highlighted by attacks
like Aurora, when it came out. Suddenly, we had the acronyms that flew
all over, such as APT --
advanced persistent threats -- and advanced
malware.
Now, we have attacks that you can't prevent, because you don’t know
them. You can't see them. They're zero-days. They're undiscovered
malware that’s in your system already.
Detect and respond
That
changed the way we moved our security. We went from prevent to a big
focus on not just preventing, because that becomes a hygiene function.
Now, we move in to detect-and-respond view, where we're looking for
anomalies. We're looking for the unknown. We're beefing up the ability
to quickly respond to those when we find them.
The
evolution, as we move forward, is to add a fourth dimension to this. We
prevent, detect, respond, and
predict. We use elements like big data to
understand not only how to get situational awareness, where we connect
the dots within our environment, but taking it one step further and
being able to predict where that next stop might land. As we evolve in
this particular area, getting to that point where we can understand and
predict will become a key capability that security departments must have
in future.
Gardner: A reminder to our audience, follow the
HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19.
Now, Brett, how long you have been at HP and
where had you been before that?
Wahlin: I've been at HP for approximately eight months. Prior to joining HP, I was the CSO at
Sony Network Entertainment. My role there was to put the security in place after the infamous
PlayStation breach. Prior to that, I was also
the CSO at
McAfee. I did a stint as CSO at
Los Alamos Laboratory.
One of the elements that we look at, of course, is how to add all this
additional complexity and additional capability into security and yet
still continue to drive value to the business and drive costs out
Years ago, I got my start doing counterintelligence for the US Army during the
Cold War.
So we had a lot of opportunity to drive and practice the intelligence
gathering and analytics components to which I'm referring around the
big-data conversation.
Gardner: I hear you
talking about getting more data, being proactive, and knowing yourself,
as an organization, in order to be better prepared for attacks. It
sounds quite similar to what we have been hearing for many years from
the management side of the things, the operations side, to know yourself
to be able better maintain performance standards and therefore be able
to quickly remediate when something went wrong.
Are we
seeing a confluence between good IT management practices and good security
practices, and should we still differentiate between the two?
Wahlin:
As we move into the good management of IT, the good management of
knowing yourself, there's a hygiene element that appears within the
correlation end of the security industry. One of the elements that we
look at, of course, is how to add all this additional complexity and
additional capability into security and yet still continue to drive
value to the business and drive costs out. So we look for areas of
efficiencies and again we will draw many similarities.
As
you understand the managing of your environments and knowing yourself,
we'll begin to apply known standards that we'll really use in the
governance perspective. This is where you will take your hygiene,
instead of looking at a very elaborate risk equations. You'll have your
typical "risk equals threat times vulnerability times impact," and what
are my probabilities.
Known standards
It
gets very confusing. So we're trying to cut cost out of those, saying
that there are known standards out there. Let's just use them. You can
use the
ISO 27001,
NIST 800-53, or even something like a
PCI DSS. Pick your standard, and that then becomes the baseline of control that you want to do. This is knowing yourself.
With
these controls, you apply them based
on risk to the company. Not all
controls are applied equally, nor should they be. As you apply the
control based on risk, there is evaluation assessment. Now, I have a
known baseline that I can measure myself against.
As
you began to build that known baseline, did you understand how well
you're doing from a hygiene perspective? These are all the things that
you should be doing that give you a chance to understand what your
problem areas are.
As you begin to understand those
metrics, you can understand where you might have early-warning
indicators that would tell you that that you might need to pay attention
to certain types of threats, risks, or areas within the company.
There are two types of organizations -- those that have been hacked and those that know they're being hacked.
There are a lot of similarities as you would look at the IT infrastructures,
server
maintenance, and understanding of those metrics for early warnings or
early indicators of problems. We're trying to do the same security,
where we make it very repeatable. We can make it standards-based and we
can then extend that across the company, of course always being based on
risk.
Muller: There is one more element to that, Dana, such as the evolution of IT management through, say, a framework like
ITIL, where you very deliberately break down the barriers between silos across IT.
Similarly,
I increasingly find with security that collaboration across
organizations -- the whole notion of general threat intelligence – forms
one of the greatest sources of potential intelligence about an imminent
threat. That can come from the operational data, or a lot of
operational logs, and then sharing that situational awareness between
the operations team is powerful.
At least this works
in the experience that I have seen with many of our clients as they
improve security outcomes through a heightened sense of what's actually
going on, across the infrastructure with customers or users.
Gardner:
Paul, as you’re traveling around and talking with a lot of
organizations, do you sense that they're sharing Brett’s perception that
risk is sort of the über concept, and that security and performance
management fall under that? Or are they still sort of catching up to
that concept, or even resisting it?
Muller:
There's sort of a veiled security joke. There are two types of
organizations -- those that have been hacked and those that know they're
being hacked.
One of the greatest challenges we have
in moving through Brett’s evolution that he described is that many
executives still have the point of view that I have a little green light
on my desktop, and that tells me I don’t have any viruses today. I can
assume that my organization is safe. That is about as sophisticated a
view of security as some executives have.
Increased awareness
Then,
of course, you have an increasing level of awareness that that is a
false sense of security, particularly in the financial services
industry, and increasingly in many governments, certainly national
government. Just because you haven't heard about a breach today, that
doesn’t mean that one isn't actually either being attempted or is, in
fact, being successful.
One of the great challenges we
have is just raising that executive awareness that a constant level of
vigilance is critical. The other place where we're slowly making
progress is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to
share negative experiences.
The culture 10 or 15 years ago was that you don’t talk about a breach; you bury it. Increasingly, we see companies like
Heartland Payment Systems
quite famously getting out there and being a big believer in sharing
the patterns of breach that occurred to help others be more aware of how
and when these things occur, but also increasingly sharing threat
intelligence.
For example, if you're one bank and
someone is attempting to break into your systems using a known pattern
of attack, it's highly likely they're trying to do it with your peers.
Given that your defenses between your peers and yourself might be
slightly less than that between you and the outside world, it's a good
idea to share that ahead of time. Getting back to Brett’s point, the
heightened sense of threat intelligence is going to help you predict and
respond more reliably.
We have to understand which ones of these we need to pay attention to
and have the ability to not only correlate amongst ourselves at the
company, but correlate across an industry.
Wahlin:
Absolutely. We look at the inevitability of the fact that networks
are penetrated, and they're penetrated on a daily basis. There's a
difference between having unwanted individuals within your network and
having the data actually exfiltrated and having a reportable breach.
As
we understand what that looks like and how the adversaries are actually
getting into our environment, that type of intelligence sharing
typically will happen amongst peers. But the need for the ability to
actually share and do so without repercussions is an interesting
concept. Most companies won't do it, because they still have that
preconceived notion that having somebody in your environment is binary
-- either my green light is on, and it's not happening, or I've got the
red light on, and I've got a problem.
In fact, there
are multiple phases of gray that are happening in there, and the ability
to share the activities, while they may not be detrimental, are
indicators that you have an issue going on and you need to be paying
attention to it, which is key when we actually start pointing
intelligence.
I've seen these logs. I've seen this type
of activity. Is that really an issue I need to pay attention to or is
that just an automated probe that’s testing our defenses? If we look at
our environment, the size of HP and how many systems we have across the
globe, you can imagine that we see that type of activity on a
second-by-second basis.
We have to understand which
ones of these we need to pay attention to and have the ability to not
only correlate amongst ourselves at the company, but correlate across an
industry.
HP may be attacked. Other high-tech
companies may also be attacked. We'll get
supply-chain attacks. We look
at various types of politically motivated attacks. Why are they hitting
us? So again, it's back to the situational awareness. Knowing the
adversary and knowing their motivations, that data can be shared. Right
now, it's usually in an ad-hoc way, peer-to-peer, but definitely there's
room for some formalized information sharing.
Information sharing
Muller:
Especially when you consider the level of information sharing that goes
on in the cybercrime world. They run the equivalent of a
Facebook
almost. There is a huge amount of information sharing that goes on in
that community. It's quite well structured. It's quite well organized.
It hasn’t necessarily always been that well organized on the defense
side of the equation. I think what you're saying is that there's
opportunity for improvement.
Wahlin: Yes, and as
we look at that opportunity, the counterintelligence person in me
always has to stand up and say, "Let's make sure that we're sharing it
and we understand our operational security, so that we're sharing that
in a way that we're not giving away our secrets to our adversaries." So
while there is an opportunity, we also have to be careful with how we
share it.
Muller: You, of course, wind up in the
situation where you could be amplifying bad information as well. If you
were paranoid enough, you could assume that the adversary is actually
deliberately planting some sort of distraction at one corner of the
organization in order to get to everybody focused on that, while they
quietly sneak in through the backdoor.
Wahlin: Correct.
Gardner:
Brett, returning to this notion of actionable intelligence and the role
of big data as an important tool, where do you go for the data? Is it
strictly the systems, the systems log information? Is there an operational side
to that that you tap more than the equipment, more than the behaviors?
What are the sources of data that you want to analyze in order to be
better at security?
Let's make sure that we're sharing it and we understand our operational
security, so that we're sharing that in a way that we're not giving away
our secrets to our adversaries.
Wahlin:
The sources that we use are evolving. We have our traditional sources,
and within HP, there is an internal project that is now going into
alpha. It's called
Project HAVEn and that’s really a combination of
ArcSight,
Vertica, and
Autonomy, integrating with
Hadoop.
As we build that out and figure out what our capabilities are to put
all this data into a large collection and being able to ask the
questions and get actionable results out of this, we begin to then
analyze our sources.
Sources are obvious as we look at
historical operation and security perspective. We have all the log files
that are in the perimeter. We have application logs, network
infrastructure logs, such as
DNS,
Active Directory, and other types of
LDAP logs.
Then
you begin to say, what else can we throw in here? That’s pretty much
covered in a traditional ArcSight type of an implementation. But what
happens if I start throwing things such as badge access or in-and-out
card swipes? How about phone logs? Most companies are running
IP phone. They will have logs. So what if I throw that in the equation?
What if I go outside to
social media and begin to throw things such as
Twitter
or Facebook feeds into this equation? What if I start pulling in public
searches for government-type databases, law enforcement databases, and
start adding these? What results might I get based on all that data
commingling?
We're not quite sure at this point. We've
added many of these sources as we start to look and ask questions and
see from which areas we're able to pull the interesting correlations
amongst different types of data to give us that situational awareness.
There's
still much to be done here, much to be discovered, as we understand the
types of questions that we should be asking. As we look at this data
and the sources, we also look at how to create that actionable
intelligence.
Disparate sources
The
type of analysts that we typically use in a security operations center
are very used to ArcSight. I ingest the log and I see correlations.
They're time-line driven. Now, we begin to ask questions of multiple
types of data sources that are very disparate in their information, and
that takes a different type of analyst.
Not only do we
have different types of sources, but we have to have different types of
skill sets to ask the right questions of those sources. This will
continue to evolve. We may or may not find value as we add sources. We
don’t want to add a source just for the heck of it, but we also want to
understand that we can get very creative with the data as it comes
together.
Muller: Brett makes a great point.
There are actually two things that I think are important to follow up on
here. The first is that, as it's true of every type of analytics
conversation I am having today, everyone talks about the term "
data scientist."
I prefer the term "data artist," because there's a certain artistry to
working out what information feeds I want to bring in.
Maybe
"judgment" might be a better word in the context of security, a certain
judgment or stylistic question in terms of what data feed I want to
bring in. It's that creativity in terms of looking at something that
doesn’t seem obvious from the outside, but could be a great leading
indicator of potential threat.
The other element is
that, once we've got that information, one of the challenges is that we
don’t want to add to the overhead or the burden of processing that
information. So it's being able to increasing apply intelligence to, as
Brett talked about, mechanistic patterns that you can determine with
traditional security information.
Event management solutions are rather mechanistic. In other words, you apply a set of logical rules to them.
When you're looking at behavioral activities, rules may not be quite as
robust as looking at techniques such as information clustering.
Increasingly,
when you're looking at behavioral activities, rules may not be quite as
robust as looking at techniques such as information clustering, where
you look for hotspots of what seem like unrelated activities at first,
but turn out later to be related.
There's a whole bunch of science in the area of crime investigation that we've applied to
cybercrime,
using some of the techniques, Autonomy for example, to uncover fraud in
the financial services market. That automation behind those techniques
increasingly is being applied to the big-data problem that security is
starting to deal with.
Gardner: I was thinking
that, too, Brett, when you were describing this opportunity to bring so
much different information together. Yes, you would get some great
benefits for security and risk purposes, but to Paul’s point, you also
might have unintended consequences in terms of being able to better
understand processes, operational efficiencies, and seeing market
opportunities that you couldn’t see before.
Have you
plumbed that at all? I know it's been a short time since you've been at
HP, but are there ancillary paybacks that would be of a business
interest in addition to being a security benefit?
Wahlin:
Yes. As we further evaluate these data sources and the ability to
understand, I believe that the insight into using the big data, not only
for security, but as more of a
business intelligence (BI)
type of perspective has been well-documented. Our focus has really been
on trying to determine the patterns and characteristics of usage.
Developing patterns
While
we look at it from a purely security mindset, where we try to develop
patterns, it takes on a counter-intelligence way of understating how
people go, where people go, and what do they do. As people try to be
unique, they tend to fall into patterns that are individual and specific
to themselves. Those patterns may be over weeks or months, but they're
there.
Right now, a lot of times, we'll be asked as a
security organization to provide badge swipes as people go in and out of
buildings. Can we take that even further and begin to understand where
the efficiency would come in based on behaviors and characteristics with
workforces. Can we divide that into different business units or
geography to try to determine the best use of limited resources across
companies? This data could be used in those areas.
The
unintended consequence that you brought up, as we look at this and
begin to come up with patterns of individuals, is that it begins to
reveal a lot about how people interact with systems -- what systems they
go to, how often they do things -- and that can be used in a negative
way. So there are privacy implications that come right to the forefront
as we begin to identify folks.
That that will be an
interesting discussion going forward, as the data comes out, patterns
start to unfold, patterns become uniquely identifiable to cities,
buildings, and individuals. What do we do with those unintended
consequences?
There are always situations where any new technology or any new capability could ultimately be used in a negative fashion.
It's
almost going to be sort of a two-step, where we can make a couple of
steps forward in progress and technology, then we are going to have to
deal with these issues, and it might take us a step back. It's
definitely evolving in this area, and these unintended consequences
could be very detrimental if not addressed early.
We
don’t want to completely shut down these types of activities based on
privacy concerns or some other type of legalities, when we could
actually potentially solve for those problems in a systematic
perspective, as we move forward with the investigation of the usage of
those technologies.
Muller: The concern that
Brett raises is the flip side of a conversation I've been having
surprisingly frequently, and it’s partly as a result of heightened
awareness of some of the reported intelligence gathering activities
associated with national governments around the world and the concerns
as relates to privacy.
The flip side of this that we
need to keep in mind is that, going back to the unintended consequences
conversation, every technology that we introduce, whether it's the car,
cell phone, or pocket camera, all can have obviously great positive
effects. We can put them to great use. There are always situations where
any new technology or any new capability could ultimately be used in a
negative fashion by bad people, or sometimes even unintentionally.
The
question we always need to bear in mind here is, as Brett talks about
it, what are the potential unintended consequences? How can we get in
front of those potential misuses early? How can we be vigilant of those
misuses and put in place good governance ahead of time?
There
are three approaches. One is to bury your head in the send and pretend
it will never happen. Second is to avoid adopting a technology at all
for fear of those unintended consequences. The third is to be aware of
them and be constantly looking for breaches of policy, breaches of good
governance, and being able to then correct for those if and when they do
occur.
Closed-loop cycle
Gardner:
Just briefly, if the governance can be put in place, and privacy
protections maintained, the opportunity is vast for a tight closed-loop
cycle -- of almost a focus group -- in real time of what employees are doing
with their systems, what applications they use, and how.
This
can be applied to product development and, for a company like HP in the
technology product development field, it could be a very, very powerful
and valuable data, in addition, of course, to being quite powerful for
security and risk-reduction purposes.
So it’ll be a
very interesting next few years, certainly with HAVEn, Vertica and HP’s
security businesses. They're probably a harbinger of what other
organizations will be doing. Going back to HP, Brett, tell us a bit
about what you think HP is doing that will set the stage and perhaps
help others to learn how to get started in terms of better security and
better leveraging of big data as a tool for better security.
Wahlin:
As HP progresses into the predicted security front, we're one of, I
believe, two companies that are actually trying to understand how to
best use HAVEn as we begin the analytics to determine the appropriate
usage of the data that is at our fingertips. That takes a predictive
capability that HP will be building.
The lagging piece of this would be the actual creation of agile security.
We've
created something called the Cyber Intelligence Center. The whole
intent of that is to develop the methodologies around how the big data
is used, the plumbing, and then the sources for which we actually create
the big data and how we move logs into big data. That's very different
than what we're doing today, traditional ArcSight loggers and ESMs.
There are a lot of mechanics that we have to build for that.
Then,
as we move out of that, we begin to look at the actual actionable
intelligence creation to use the analytics. What questions should we
ask? Then, when we get the answer, is it something we need to do
something about? The lagging piece of this would be the actual creation
of agile security. In some places, we even call it mobile security, and
it's different than mobility. It's security that can actually move.
If
you look at the war-type of analogies, back in the day, you had these
columns of men with rifles, and they weren’t that mobile. Then, as you
got into mechanized infantry and other types of technologies came
online, airplanes and such, it became much more mobile. What's the
equivalent to that in the cyber security world, and how do we create
that.
Right now, it's quite difficult to move a
firewall around. You don’t just unplug or re-
VLAN
a network. It's very difficult. You bring down applications. So what is
the impact of understanding what's coming at you, maybe tomorrow, maybe
next week? Can we actually make a infrastructure such that it can be
reconfigured to not only to defend against that attack, but perhaps even
introduce some adversarial confusion.
I've done my
reconnaissance. It looks like this. I come at it tomorrow, and it looks
completely different. That is the kill chain that will set back the
adversary quite a bit, because most of the time, during a kill chain,
it's actually trying to figure out where am I, what I have, where the
are assets located, and doing reconnaissance through the network.
So
there are a lot of interesting things that we can do as we come to this
next step in the evolution of security. At HP, we're trying to develop
that at scale. Being the large company that we are, we get the
opportunity to see an enormous amount of data that we wouldn’t see if we
are another company.
Numerous networks
For example, HP has millions of
IP addresses
and subnets that are out there. We have to try to account for and
figure out what's happening on any one of these networks. This gives us
insight to the types of traffic, types of application configurations,
types of interconnects between different subnets, types of devices,
anything from printers all the way through unreleased operating systems.
How do you deal with things such as manufacturing
supply chains, that are all connected to these networks. Those types of
inputs begin to create the methodologies that feed into the an upcoming
cyber intelligence center.
Gardner: Paul, it
almost sounds as if security is an accelerant to becoming a better
organization, a more data-driven organization which will pay dividends
in many ways. Do you agree that security is still necessary, still
pertinent, now that it's perhaps forcing the hand of organizations to
modernize in ways that they may not have done, if we weren’t facing such
a difficult security environment?
Muller: I
completely agree with you. Information security and the arms race, quite
literally the analogy, is a forcing function for many organizations. It
would be hard to say this without a sense of chagrin, but the great
part about this is that there are actually technologies that are being
developed as a result of this. Take ArcSight Logo as an example, as a
result of this arms race.
Just as the space race threw up a whole bunch of technologies like
Teflon or silicon adhesives that we use today, the the security arms
race is generating some great byproducts.
Those
technologies can now be applied to business problems, gathering
real-time operational technology data, such as seismic events, Twitter
feeds, and so forth, and being able to incorporate those back in for
business and public-good purposes. Just as the space race threw up a
whole bunch of technologies like Teflon or silicon adhesives that we use
today, the the security arms race is generating some great byproducts
that are being used by enterprises to create value, and that’s a
positive thing.
Gardner: Last word to you,
Brett, before we sign off. Do you concur on this notion of security as
an imperative, but that has a greater longer term benefit?
Wahlin:
Absolutely. The analogy of
the space race is perfect, as you look at
trying to do the security maturation within an environment. You begin to
see that a lot of the things that we're doing, whether it's
understanding the environment, being able to create the operational
metrics around an environment, or push into the fact that we've got to
get in front of the adversaries to create the environment that is
extremely agile is going to throw off a lot of technology innovations.
It’s
going to throw off some challenges to the IT industry and how things
are put together. That’s going to force typically sloppy operations --
such as I am just going to throw this up together, I am not going to
complete an acquisition, I don’t document, I don't understand my
environmental -- to clean it up as we go through those processes.
The
confusion and the complexity within an environment is directly opposed
to creating a sense of security. As we create the more secure
environment, environments that are capable of detecting anomalies within
them, you have to put the hygienic pieces in place. You have to create
the technologies that will allow you to leapfrog the adversaries. That’s
definitely going to be both a driver for business efficiencies, as well
as technology, and innovation as it comes down.
Gardner:
Well, very good. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been
exploring how IT leaders are improving security and reducing risks as
they adapt to new and often harsh realities of doing business in cyber
land and we have been learning through an example of HP and how it's
adapting its well.
So with that please join me in
thanking our cohost, Paul Muller, the Chief Software Evangelist at HP
Software. Thanks so much, Paul.
Muller: It's a pleasure, Dana.
Gardner:
And I would like to thank our supporter for this series HP Software and
remind our audience to carry on the dialog with Paul through
his blog,
tweets, and
The Discover Performance Group on LinkedIn.You can also follow more HP security ideas on these
products and
research blogs.
Then
lastly, a huge thank you to our special guest, Brett Wahlin, Vice
President and Global Chief Information Security Officer at HP. Thanks so
much, Brett.
Wahlin: Thank you, Dana, and thanks, Paul.
Gardner:
And you can gain more insight and information on the best in IT
performance management at
HP.com/go/discoverperformance and you can
always access this and other episodes in ongoing HP Discover Performance
podcast series on
iTunes under BriefingsDirect.
I'm
Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your co-host
and moderator for this ongoing discussion of IT innovation. Thanks again
for listening and comeback next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Follow the HP Protect 2013 activities next week, Sept. 16-19.
Transcript
of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how increased and more sophisticated
attacks are forcing enterprises to innovate and expand security
practices to not only detect, but predict system intrusions. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.
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