Navigating the Rapid Digital Shift: Ticket on the Bus, Not the Whole Bus

Global Companies’ Evaluation of Cybersecurity Solutions Selection Has Been Steadily Changing 

If it wasn’t already obvious to cybersecurity sales teams, there’s been a sea change for large organizations evaluating and buying new security products to protect their businesses. Responding to COVID-19, transformation plans that enable “work from home” such as Zero Trust identity and access management have been greatly accelerated, while technology refreshes and other capital-intensive plans are being pushed back.

Now, several months into this new operations paradigm, there may be added credence to the adage “in for a penny, in for a pound.” 

Many large companies have successfully navigated the digital shift to most of their workforce working remotely, finding the transition less difficult than first envisaged and achieving higher productivity than anticipated. Because such companies have resolved long-held internal conflicts over the security and integrity of cloud-based business operations, many of those postponed capital-intensive projects are being reviewed with a cloud-enabled, subscription-based lens.

This has several ramifications for cybersecurity vendors—particularly the specialized boutiques and innovative startups looking to quickly capitalize on new security opportunities.

Global companies’ evaluation of cybersecurity solutions selection has been steadily changing over the past couple years. The rapid digital shift of recent months has reinforced the need for change. 

I’d like to offer advice to vendors attempting to reach out and position their new cybersecurity products.

1. “I’ll buy a ticket, not the whole bus.” For decades, startups have looked to the largest companies as the Golden Goose and focused great energies in selling into them. The premise being that by solving a critical problem for them at a very high premium, that will cover the costs of developing an actual solution that can be sold broadly—e.g., the sale will fund my company’s product development. Although there may be a few cases where only a custom-tuned solution is required, many large businesses now prefer to buy a close-enough solution off the rack and work with the vendor as an advisor—not an investor. CISOs are looking at the sustainable list price of the solution and will purchase at a discounted level proportional to their deployment’s scale.
2. “Cost projection is critical.” Although highly versatile and scalable, cloud-based services billing can be difficult to predict—especially if the cybersecurity solution requires multiple third-party and cloud-provider SaaS dependencies. Security owners and budget holders are requiring vendors to provide accurate billing forecast and tiered discount models for the complete solution—models that include all dependent service costs (e.g., log storage analytics, container management). Vendors need to remove as much calculus from the pricing as possible and be prepared for billed services to be pared back if overly optimistic projections exceed the planned budget. Cost discussions have replaced those about cloud solutions prices.
3. “Features must be pre-integrated.” If the product is a feature (which, let’s face it, almost all new startup products are!), recognize it as a feature and don’t position it as a partial solution. As a feature product, integration with the solutions businesses already use is a prerequisite, and sales representatives should lead with the integration and interoperability first. CISOs are looking to shrink their attack surface and simplify the portfolio of products and vendors they rely on, and are increasingly reluctant to take on the task of brokering partnership between vendors as a prerequisite for extracting new protection value. Feature products benefit greatly by being enabled from within a solution provider’s product or marketplace.

On a related note, with the surge to execute day-to-day business operations remotely with a diverse and globally distributed workforce, cybersecurity buying decisions will increasingly factor accessibility, usability, and inclusiveness in solution design and operability. Vendors will be steered toward cloud-standardized accessibility interfaces—enabling visually impaired employees to use screen readers or dexterity-limited users to employ voice-to-text controls—to perform their analysis.

These changes are not unique to the largest enterprise businesses and are trickling down to other educated cybersecurity buyers feeling the same buying pain. Forewarned is forearmed.

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: SecurityWeek - June 9, 2020

Cloud is Creating Security and Network Convergence

Network Security Expertise is Needed More Than Ever Inside Security Operations Centers and on DevOps Teams

Digital transformation forces many changes to a business as it migrates to the public cloud. One of the most poorly examined is the convergence of network and security administration tasks and responsibilities in the public cloud.

On premises, the division between roles is pretty clear. The physical nature of networking infrastructure – the switches, routers, firewall appliances, network taps, WiFi hubs, and miles upon miles of cable – makes it easy to separate responsibilities. If it has power, stuff connects to it, it routes packets, and weighs more than 5 pounds, it probably belongs to the networking team.

In the cloud, where network connectivity features are defined by policies and code, the network is ephemeral. More importantly, the network is a security boundary – protecting services, applications, and data.

For many organizations, an early steppingstone in their digital transformation is virtualizing all their on-premises applications, infrastructure, and administrative and monitoring processes. Operating almost entirely within an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) mode, previously favored network vendors provide virtual machine (VM) versions of their on-premises networking and security appliances – effectively making the transition to public cloud the equivalent of shifting to a new co-hosting datacenter.

This early stage takes very little advantage of public cloud. VMs remain implanted in statically defined networking architectures and old-style network monitoring remains largely the same. However, as organizations embrace continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), DevOps, serverless functions, and other cloud-native services, the roles of network and security administrator converge rapidly. At that point, network topology ceases to be the grid that servers and applications must snap to. Instead, leveraging the software defined network (SDN) nature of the cloud, the network becomes ephemeral – continuously defined, created, and disposed of in code.

With zero trust running core to modern CI/CD and DevOps security practices in the cloud, SDN has become a critical framework for protecting data, identities, and access controls.

Today, a cloud security architect, security analyst, or compliance officer cannot fulfill their security responsibilities without being a cloud network expert too. And, vice versa, a systems architect or network engineer cannot bring value to cloud operations without being comfortable wearing size 15 cloud security shoes.

For networking professionals transitioning to the cloud, I offer the following advice:

• Partner extensively with your peers on the security team – they too are a transformation and are destined to become network experts.
• Plan to transition from VM infested IaaS environments as fast as possible to cloud-native services which are easier to understand, manage, and deploy.
• Become familiar with the portal management experience of each new network (security) service, but plan on day-to-day management being at the command line.
• Brush up your scripting language expertise and get comfortable with code management tools. In a CI/CD workplace GitHub and its ilk are where the real action happens.
• Throw out the old inhibitions of consuming valuable network bandwidth with event logs and streaming service health telemetry. In the age of cloud SIEM, data is king and storage is cheap, and trouble-shooting ephemeral network problems requires both in abundance.
• Forget thumbing through network security books to learn. Training is all online. Watch the cloud provider’s workshop videos and test the lessons in real-time online.

With so many cloud critical controls existing at the network layer, network security expertise is needed more than ever inside security operations centers and on DevOps teams.

The faster in-house network administrators can transition to becoming public cloud network security engineers, architects, or analysts, the faster their organizations can implement digital transformation.

-- Gunter Ollmann

First Published: SecurityWeek - October 8, 2019