Hold The Front Page: Common Sense Prevails In IT Security Shock!

IT, and security especially, is overloaded with slick marketing terms that have little or no substance behind them – the classic “solution searching for a problem” scenario.

But… just occasionally the complete opposite prevails, as in the most recent test project I’ve just completed for Ziften, a US-based tech company focusing on endpoint security and asset management. And there’s the rub – for years, nay decades, I’ve been talking about the importance of combining elements of IT into what I would term “broad network management”. After all, what is security if not a fundamental element of network management? However, what has happened is that – just like the early days of datacoms and telecoms teams creating those “Islands of expertise” within IT; I mean, these guys didn’t simply not communicate, they despised each other! – those islands of IT expertise have expanded, whereby security doesn’t interact directly with networking.

The result is a hotchpotch approach to the most crucial elements of running an IT shop. Moreover, the duplication of resource and effort is extremely costly. So it’s a double non-whammy! So here’s the deal – how do you secure an endpoint if you don’t know it’s there to begin with? In other words, the starting point for securing endpoints is to discover and manage what is on the network to start off with, then apply the security. No, it’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. For once…

This is the approach Ziften has taken with its product – eureka! So we now have method and order in place and the product does exactly what it says on the tin (or the marketing spiel). Which brings me onto the point I made at the beginning of this post – slick marketing terms, or the reverse thereof. The categorisation for the Ziften solution sits in the relatively newly defined SysSecOps market – Systems and Security Operations, i.e. the combination thereof. Doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue so much as trip it up. But who cares? Maybe this is the golden IT rule. Abbreviations that are a bit rubbish actually stand for something meaningful and useful…

Meantime, my report can be found via this link – read it and get a dose of common sense. Then, if you’re a marketing type, think of a better category title -)

http://ziften.com/wp-content/resources/Ziften-Zenith-Review-A-BBT-Report.pdf