Reading about a latest IT security start-up announcement yesterday, I was struck with a familiar theme. To generically summarize, “Those [big companies] can’t manoeuvre like we can! We’re nimble, not big and bloated like [those guys]! We can innovate…FASTER! We are best able to stop the [latest threat] you’re hearing about.” Perhaps.

Beyond single-point .png When you’re Micro Focus with decades of development experience from leading security brands and comprising a broad solution portfolio, feisty new companies tend to use a common differentiation approach pulled from the textbooks to chip away at your edges and exploit a niche. “What if you need to protect sensitive data on a Raspberry Pi with facial recognition monitoring of a payment terminal to trigger a blocking rule based on identity analytics!?” What if, indeed—but when developing solutions to solve a wide range of privacy threat use cases, where scalability, efficiency, and global impact are important, your customers have a more fundamental set of foundational needs. Single point solutions try not to be all things to all people, but fill a gap and expand—whether market space, technology advantage, deployment model, or otherwise. It’s a unique and valid tactic, but may not address the bigger picture of the modern IT landscape. So I’d like to explain a bit on how large companies with broad portfolios innovate differently.

First off, CAN big companies innovate with agility and at scale?

What your latest Silicon Valley start-up won’t tell you is that, while their innovation may be more nimble and without the obligations required of servicing an established customer base, that innovation tends to be incremental and focused at best. For example, deploying similar technology using containers for a new cloud form factor approach. That’s just the reality of having limited funding and development budgets, a limited staff and a laser focus on ROI. One has to pick one’s battles to solve short-term goals. But can a small start-up innovate at the same level that larger established companies demand? What advantages do large, established vendors bring?

A large security software developer can better address fundamental innovations that come from the combining of massive portfolios. When you look at the Micro Focus security brands today that include Voltage, Vertica, ArcSight, Fortify, NetIQ, ZENworks and beyond, the core capabilities of protecting users, applications and data can be leveraged, including years of IP invested, that impact and accelerate massive business transformation. Rather than incremental, massive multi-year IT transformational strategy can be addressed, such as scaling out big data analytics across global application environments, migrating DevOps to a fully cloud-native approach while securing data across hybrid infrastructure, or applying identity to drive universal access policies across all of this. These are all lofty goals that need to be solved by combining fundamental security technologies that are core to business. Let me provide a few Micro Focus examples:

Voltage and Vertica

Data privacy is not simply a matter of protecting data at endpoints or ingestion points, but the data analytics created as a result of those edge activities, stored in data lakes and warehouses. As a singular solution, Micro Focus Voltage is able to protect data across a global enterprise of endpoints and devices using encryption, however that same technology can also be applied within the data analytics environment itself. A combined solution with a Vertica add-on makes it easy for Vertica users to protect data within Vertica, comply with privacy mandates such as the GDPR, and limit data access and risk exposure inside the organization to only appropriate authorized applications and users.

Voltage and Vertica, and ArcSight

What if your leading SIEM threat analytics applications, ArcSight, use Vertica for scaling the SIEM platform for a global organization? Spoiler alert: you now also have access to Voltage for data privacy controls when based on Vertica! But moreover, Voltage supports ADP Connectors to enable data privacy for security events ingested into the ArcSight environment. When you combine market-leading security products, 1+1+1=5, because you get fast time to value by enabling new capabilities integrated with your current products.

Voltage and Vertica, and ArcSight…and NetIQ, and Fortify, and beyond

You can see where this is heading. Innovation is not simply about a fast, short-term, manoeuvre, but an effective long game strategy that expands to support your evolving enterprise security posture. With decades of innovation already at the disposable of Micro Focus product lines, combining portfolio technologies into solutions that generate value-add brings new opportunities to reduce risk, meet privacy requirements, and holistically address data privacy audit and compliance. This approach is not easily matched in a single-point solution that only solves a specific use case or delivers an incremental feature, alone.

A real-world example is in meeting privacy compliance mandates, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Here is how a coordinated solution approach from Micro Focus can help every step of the way, without enterprise users hitting a roadblock that halts their GDPR compliance journey, first…

• Structured Data Manager: Identifies and classifies the data at risk to assess this fundamental GDPR starting point, while using…
• ArcSight: To monitor security events that provide insight into risks, with those events stored in a data lake, protected by…
• Voltage: With encryption of ingested security events and the data analytics stored in a date lake, that…
• Vertica: Scales to meet the analytics requirements of large, global, distributed organizations, which have…
• Fortify: Implementing applications with privacy by design best practices, including Voltage format-preserved encrypted data moving in-and-out of the cloud, where…
• NetIQ: Users maintain control of the GDPR-compliant uses of sensitive data to meet audits for authorization privileges.

Organizations that are on a data privacy journey such as GDPR compliance can’t stop along the way to smell the roses. Each day, where risk isn’t being addressed in a coordinated approach, is an opportunity for a data privacy breach to result in massive fines and further remediation headaches. It’s critical to have a vision that goes beyond what a single point solution can offer to see the proverbial forest for the trees.

Getting more from a complete security portfolio at the Cybersecurity Summit 2018 (Washington, DC – September 25-27).

Micro Focus will be in Washington, DC, this September at our Cybersecurity Summit, to highlight more of its cross-portfolio innovations that include data privacy, breach defense, compliance and governance solutions, and more. Join us and your peers to gain more insights, hear best practices and collaborate at this annual information security event.

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