Security vendors have been accused of being too “myopically focussed” on their own solutions, when they should have a wider perspective on what IT managers need.
Barmak Meftah, president and CEO of AlienVault, told IT Security Guru that vendors should “put themselves in the shoes of IT” and look to simplify solutions to make them consumable and usable. “This is a simple mission to make security analytics easy to digest,” he said.
“Too many companies are focused on how to convince customers why their solution is two per cent better than another vendor solution, but the buyer doesn’t care – they care that you can provide effective security and lower their costs.”
Meftah was responding to recent findings in the recent Forrsights Security Survey from Forrester, which found from surveying more than 2,000 IT executives and decision-makers from North America and Europe that 21 per cent allocated their security budget to network security last year, and 46 per cent of firms expect to increase spending in this area in 2014.
Asked if this proved that there was more interest in internal network security than cloud-based deployments, he said that there were three solutions for vendors: you offer solutions in the cloud; you offer solutions on-premise; or you deploy in form factor so the user chooses.
“Interestingly, what the report does highlight is that a ton of IT infrastructure is still on-premise and the transition of IT to the cloud shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this ‘old school reality’, as on-premise infrastructure remains a huge attack surface,” he said.
“The 46 per cent figure could be of more interest to vendors in terms of on-premise solutions, but it doesn’t surprise me. It is, however, pretty enlightening – particularly as we are in an era of buzzwords. This report brings attention to the fact that, despite the number of trends and innovations that we are seeing- which are all great- time and time again, industry struggles to keep pace with buzzwords, so naturally we tend take our eye off old components.”
The survey also found that 57 per cent of respondents indicated that they prefer to source from one single vendor’s portfolio. Meftah said that not only being a believer of this, his company was an architect of it, and the key drivers should be ease of use, affordability and simplicity, rather than expecting IT managers to “wade through a variety of solutions”.
