Sharon Besser: March 2008 Archives

I attended one of the most interesting customer meetings yesterday. It was interesting because the customer is asking to deploy SecureSphere in order to protect the entire universe. His universe. As you can guess, this company (let's keep the name to ourselves) is developing one of the coolest games. This is a multilayer online game that has its own economy. This economy is managed by the users and just like any other economy; some users are more corrupt than others. SecureSphere is protecting the treasury database, ensuring that (real life) gamers will not cheat and destroy the (virtual) economy. Just imagine that a virtual bank will start to offer cheap loans to other users that can not afford to pay mortgages... it can destroy the economy.... In short, I was very excited to learn about this opportunity and watch how imagination sometimes is well connected with reality.

So how is the car related to this post? On the way to the data center, we spotted one of those beauties. The Bugatti Veyron is the most powerful, most expensive, and fastest street-legal production car in the world, with a proven top speed of over 400 km/h (407 km/h or 253 mph). The title of the most expensive mass production car in the world comes with a price tag of $1,700,000. Watching this car and thinking about the economy, one can REALLY understand why treasury applications should be protected. Not just in the virtual world.   

What makes a solution better, unique and different?

Boston, MA

Today, I participated in a security panel that was (very well) organized by our partner, Netanium Network Security, Inc. Four different vendors, focusing on solving different aspects of information security, answered the moderator's questions and guided the audience through our collective experience. One of the guys at the audience asked us "what makes you better than your competitors". Each vendor answered slightly different, yet very similar, highlighting manageability, flexibility, scalability, ease of use etc. I decided to give a different perspective and explained that in my opinion, the reason that customers select our solutions and choose us as their trusted application data security and compliance companion is due to our ability to perform two tasks better than anyone else: 1) Being visionary, passionate and know exactly what needs to be developed and delivered in order to solve the problem, address customer needs, fit into their environment and create a platform for growth. 2) Ability to execute, as it is not enough to have a great vision. A great company is capable to take its vision and create the right products, providing the best support and deliver the necessary services.

I guess that in a way, I was saying that our solutions are better since we have faster products; it can be managed easier, scale better and provide the necessary flexibility. But we will sustain this advantage by continuing to deliver our vision.

SecureSphere Wins another WAF shoot out

What a great start for my first blog post with our new blogging system. Information security magazine published a review of six (6) web application firewall products. Beside winning this shoot-out review and scoring top marks in each category: ease of installation and configuration; administration; depth of security policy control; monitoring, alerting, auditing and reporting; and overall security effectiveness. SecureSphere received a rare compliment. The magazine names it "The closet thing to a silver bullet". Anyone in the security industry will tell you that "there is no silver bullet". I tend to agree. No product is perfect and its effectiveness is based on the defined policies and how well it's being integrated into the network, and more important the business process.  SecureSphere is not different in that sense, however, its administrative interface, security capabilities, multiple deployment options and depth of policy control makes it unique and different.  The metaphor of the silver bullet applies to any straightforward solution perceived to have extreme effectiveness, and when we're thinking about it, SecureSphere is indeed the closest thing to a silver bullet for application security and compliance: it was designed, engineered and built to solve application security problems.

Anyone that had to hunt werewolves, know what I'm talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werewolf).

Read more about the review at http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazineFeature/0,296894,sid14_gci1303838,00.html