Better Together

Security Correspondent Daniel Bardsley Speaks To Industry Experts To Discuss Why Alliances And Interoperability Between Security Vendors Are Vital In Keeping Organisations Cyber Resilient Amid A Growing Threat Landscape.

- 

As the threats from malign cyber actors continue to grow, so does the complexity of the efforts to protect from these attackers. Indeed, some companies use cybersecurity products from – literally – scores of vendors, adding extra names to the list as new threats emerge.

This increased complexity brings with it complications, because the myriad products defending a network often do not communicate with one another, making it more difficult to monitor and deal with threats.

“[Non-interoperability] creates a massive amount of workload for the security administrators,” says Professor David Chadwick, a professor of information systems security in the School of Computing at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.

According to Ken Elefant, a managing director at Sorenson Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, United States, that invests in growing cybersecurity firms, most enterprises would prefer to be able to buy all of their cybersecurity products from one vendor.

“Enterprises today are being inundated with [products from] dozens of companies and they’re not fully integrated with their legacy systems,” he says.

“But it’s been continually getting more and more difficult for companies to focus on just a few major vendors because they don’t have the coverage for these new attack vectors, so enterprises need to buy from forward-looking startups.”

Indeed Elefant has spoken to chief information security officers (CISOs) who are dealing with products from as many as 80 vendors.

Other cybersecurity experts too have identified similar issues.