Last week, Neal Foster and I led a CIO Summit discussion on mobile security best practices at MobileCON, which gave us the opportunity to talk with conference attendees about their evolving mobility strategies. Several common themes emerged from these conversations, including the fact that while most organizations were developing plans to address the explosion of personal devices entering their workplaces, far fewer had been given additional budget to address BYOD and its associated security and compliance risks.
At the same time, the number of tools and approaches for managing the onslaught of devices in their companies was rising rapidly and creating a new layer of complexity. For many of the folks we spoke with, there was an overarching concern about how to give employees what they want—anytime, anywhere connectivity to corporate resources and data—without introducing unforeseen threats or security vulnerabilities.
According to an IT Executive and CEO Survey on Mobile Consumerization Trends & Perceptions conducted by Decisive Analytics, these concerns are quite valid. Nearly half of the 900 senior executives polled reported a data/security breach due to an employee-owned device accessing their company network—despite already having IT security policies and tools in place. We’re hearing about this predicament more and more as IT organizations struggle with siloed, disparate security tools that are failing to deliver the level of protection they now need to support BYOD and beyond.
Today, Dell is making major strides in helping customers solve their biggest security and compliance challenges and safeguard data wherever it resides—on the network, in the cloud or on mobile devices. Our Connected Security vision and holistic approach, spanning from endpoint to the data center to the cloud, is delivering the best line of defense for combatting threats and solving today’s most pressing security and compliance problems.
In delivering on its Connected Security vision with innovative solutions (insert link to news release), I join my colleague Matt Madeiros, vice president and general manager, Security Products, Dell Software, in acknowledging the importance of Dell’s comprehensive set of predictive, context-aware security solutions that break down silos and protect data where it resides.
In my role as the head of systems management at Dell Software, I’m excited to include Dell™ ChangeAuditor 6.0, and Dell™ InTrust™ 10.7 in the newly expanded security portfolio as they both address vital security and compliance requirements. Of the possible 47,000 data breach threats across organizations in 2012 as tallied in the Verizon 2013 Data Breach Investigation Report, 69 percent came from insiders. This underscores the problems caused when companies have limited visibility into who is doing what in their IT environment, which can lead to increased internal and external breaches, resulting in significant financial losses and damage to the company’s reputation.
Luckily, ChangeAuditor makes it much easier to eliminate unknown security concerns by tracking who did what, when, where, why and from which workstation. Real-time alerts and reports also help customers detect threats and patterns to enable rapid responses and resolutions to any security issues. With ChangeAuditor 6.0, we’re allowing our customers to look at security in context from different angles and dig deeper into events and correlate different information sources for a better understanding and forensics analysis of events and trends.
Additionally, Dell InTrust helps organizations address regulatory compliance and internal security risks through the secure, real-time collection and compression of event logs. Moreover, through integration with Dell SecureWorks, Dell InTrust 10.7 enriches SIEM (security information and event management) with intelligent data feeds that capture crucial aspects of user activity on Windows systems to detect internal threats in less time and with less overhead. InTrust also provides security in context as it enables customers to maintain and compress volumes of security information across data, user, network, applications and services. An invaluable solution for improving the efficiency of security, operational and compliance reporting, InTrust eliminates silos of information, which is a fundamental tenet of Dell’s Connected Security story.
At Dell, we’re focused on delivering balanced approaches to security and BYOD, which we we’re striving to achieve with innovative and connected solutions that adapt and grow with our customers’ businesses. I’d love to hear what you have in store for BYOD and beyond, so email me at Tom_Kendra@Dell.com to share which approaches you think will meet your needs both now and in the future.