By Matt McKinley, U.S. director of product development, Stonesoft
The MSPAlliance welcomes a guest post from Stonesoft, Inc. (www.stonesoft.com), a global provider of network security solutions to MSSPs, enterprises and government organizations.
In a post-mortem article on RSA Conference 2012, George Hulme at CSO summed it up nicely when he wrote: “One lesson of RSA Conference 2012 is that we are neither winning or losing the security battle.”
There is no one culprit for this position in which the network security industry has found itself. But, hardware-based security certainly deserves its fair share of blame. Many of today’s solutions are tied to underlying hardware, which has put network security in a brittle, inflexible conundrum.
Security can only be effective when it’s agile, responsive and easily managed. And, that can only be achieved when software is at the heart of the network security solution thereby providing a way for code to be quickly and easily optimized as new threats and challenges arise.
Case in point: A customer with a three year-old security appliance needs more performance, contextual awareness and AET/APT protection. With a software-based solution, these improvements, features and enhancements can be made to software independent of any hardware. If the solution relies on specific co-processors or "systems on a chip" that are engineered to work a specific way, then these improvements can’t be made without reworking the physical components.
Software-based security is the single most important approach to tipping the scales back in security’s favor. Without it, many service providers and vendors will find themselves at next year’s RSA Conference eating humble pie.
