Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Take one of your customers and take us through how this all works. What points do you start monitoring? What kinds of things do you find? Walk us through a use case.

Mike Potts: We can take HP as an example. We got a large use case on our site as well as theirs. Despite the fact that they have a SIM technology which is ArcSight or Tipping Point, they are still not able to get complete contextual visibility into the entire network. We’re turning their switches and routers into sensors and populating that data into our engine to give them visibility as to what’s transversing the network. We’re collecting this metadata off of switches and routers in hundreds of thousands of flows per second. In their particular case, I believe it’s around 350,000 flows per second that we’re able to aggregate and stitch back together the session for them to seamlessly understand what’s actually happening in their network. With the algorithm and behavioral nature that we have, we are able to apply those to that traffic and begin to see when anomalous traffic happens to be able to figure out who, what, when, where, and how an event begins to deteriorate.

Sramana Mitra: Where do things stand right now? What is the state of the union in terms of network security at the moment? I’m now asking you a bit outside of your company’s focus and more of an industry overview.

Mike Potts: What we’re beginning to see from a network security point of view is that there is a shift that’s occurring. It used to be that 100% of the investment was going to the perimeter, just trying to lock the front doors through traditional defense-based systems. We’re beginning to see a shift of that spend. The best thing you can do is lock your front door from a first-line of defense point of view. Now that that’s been done, we’re seeing a shift more to the network security side. Folks are becoming more aware of these advanced malware and persistent threats that have materialized.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope
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