How This Crowd-Sourced Platform Is Rethinking Online Security

Have you wondered if the security industry has got it all wrong with a misplaced focus on complex protective and preventative point solutions? Or have the recent rise in high-profile attacks made you question if we need to rethink cybersecurity?

Barmak Meftah, CEO of Silicon Valley-based AlienVault, believes many are drowning in ineffective preventative measures. He also feels that many are blindly draining resources with investments in expensive, disjointed solutions.

Could the traditional methods of protection be falsely perpetuating the myth that they‘ll keep the bad guys out?

Meftah is thinking about vulnerabilities from a different vantage point. The platform has simplified the way organizations identify and respond to today’s ever-evolving threat landscape.

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Armed with a unique and award-winning approach that combines the essential security controls with an all-in-one platform known as AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM), maybe the bad guys should start getting worried.

AlienVault’s Open Threat Exchange is the world’s largest crowd-sourced threat intelligence community. Making efficient and affordable threat detection attainable for resource-constrained IT teams is something that is also top of their agenda.

On my podcast, Meftah told me how they are currently enabling thousands of small, medium and large organizations to detect cyber threats very quickly. But more importantly respond to the threats effectively as well as immediately.

The driving force behind cloud and IoT is the availability and analysis of information, but they must be managed and monitored in the right way. If data is misused, or inadequately protected, the consequences can be severe.

Behind the scenes, AlienVault has transformed from a Silicon Valley startup to a hyper-growth security powerhouse. An impressive 53% year-over-year sales growth combined with increasing its install base by over 65% percent to more than 5,000 commercial customers is getting them noticed for all the right reasons.

As companies finally begin to take security problems seriously, they are also becoming much more protective around data privacy and data integrity. The AlienApp for Office 365 is another feature that offers something a little different from the norm.

Rather than assume a cloud-based solution is somebody else’s problem, Meftah felt Office 365 users deserved additional protection too. The ability to track user activity and closely monitor any changes that are made to the files or policies is certainly a step in the right direction. And, the AlienApp for Office 365 is one of many, with similar applications being offered for products from Cisco, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks and others.

There is much more to information security than firewalls and antivirus protection. For any organization to have a fighting chance against a rising barrage of cyber attacks they will need a security solution that offers multiple capabilities ideally inside a unified platform.

Real-time access to a complete view of assets, vulnerabilities, and threats is no longer just a nice to have. Thankfully, boardrooms are beginning to understand the ROI of investing in cyber security.

While many are still debating the pros and cons of on-premise, cloud, and hybrid solutions, the inconvenient truth is that security is now everyone’s business. But, the fact we are talking about dealing with threats differently is another big step in the right direction.