ESG Blogs

McAfee chose “time” as the overarching theme of its 2019 MPower conference, held the week of October 2 in Las Vegas. The idea of the theme being that time is central to everything we do in the cybersecurity industry. Attackers look to increase dwell time while security teams try to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to response (MTTR). For what it's worth, I felt that my time attending was well-spent. McAfee’s always done a good job focusing its message and approach for these types of events, and this year was no different. The major announcements focused on cloud and analytics, with a bit of open architectures and partnerships included as well – all top of mind priorities for security practitioners.

Are you aware that October is national cybersecurity awareness month? If you aren’t, you’re not alone. There’s lots of cybersecurity awareness activities in DC, some states, and universities, but it’s all but ignored by the industry at large. 

According to ESG research, 73% of security professionals say that cyber-risk management is more difficult at their organization today than it was 2 years ago. Why? Survey respondents point to things like the growing attack surface, the rising number of software vulnerabilities, and the increasing technical prowess of cyber-adversaries. 

I had the opportunity to attend Juniper’s analyst event at its Sunnyvale, California headquarters on September 10. Truth be told, Juniper has been fairly quiet on the security front for the last few years, so I was interested to get up to speed on the company’s direction. Juniper divested the Pulse Secure portion of its portfolio in 2014 and since that time has not always articulated a consistent vision around, or emphasis on, security. My impression after listening to CEO Rami Rahim and CTO Bikash Koley lay out Juniper’s corporate vision and how the Connected Security approach ties in, is that they do see security as a core component of the overall strategy, especially as it relates to expanding the company’s enterprise footprint. Admittedly, there weren’t a lot of specifics provided relative to security announcements, but I’m an optimist and believe there will be some meat put on the bone sooner rather than later.

I first came up with the SOAPA concept in late 2016. Here’s the blog I wrote in November of that year describing the architecture and its rationale. 

If it’s not clear yet, elastic cloud gateways are a major focus of ESG’s network security research. I discussed the idea in a previous blog…and video…and second video. As a refresher, ECGs are multi-channel, multi-mode, cloud-delivered security gateways built on a globally distributed, cloud-native microservices platform. ECGs automatically scale to provide end-user access and threat prevention to a range of cloud services, with tightly integrated data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities utilizing a centralized control plane and scalable data plane to arbitrate access and inspect content.

When you think about VMware and cybersecurity, two products have always stood out. NSX has evolved into a common micro-segmentation tool for east/west traffic within ESXi, while AppDefense monitors applications, determines “normal” behavior, and detects anomalies.

With the recent announcement by VMware that it will be acquiring Carbon Black, VMware will be adding much needed security expertise and technology to its already strong portfolio.

Trustwave and Grupo Tecno, a large information technology integrator in Mexico, are teaming up to offer Trustwave Managed Security Services and cybersecurity technologies to enterprises and other institutions in Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries in Latin America. This is exciting news for both. Trustwave expands its footprint in Latin America; Grupo Tecno firmly implants itself in the managed security services (MSSs) and security operations center (SOC) arena with a strong global partner.

Detecting and responding to cyber-threats quickly can mean the difference between a cybersecurity annoyance and a costly data breach. This makes threat detection and response a critical business requirement.

Given this, you’d think that threat detection and response would be well resourced with highly-tuned processes running as efficiently as a Swiss watch. Unfortunately, this is far from true. According to ESG research, threat detection and response is fraught with numerous issues. Here is a list of the top 5 threat detection and response challenges, according to 372 enterprise cybersecurity and IT professionals: