Security Holds the Key to Fearless Innovation

Organizations today are up against an immense challenge to protect valuable data and intellectual property in an environment where attackers know more about us than ever, the lines between insiders and outsiders is blurred and instantaneous access to information is table stakes. All of this along with the pressure to embrace business transformation and continuously innovate.

It’s about managing risk to enable fearless innovation. It’s about protecting what matters most to your organization, and detecting and responding faster than your adversaries.  This is what keeps CIOs and business leaders up at night, and what we will be discussing with industry experts, customers and partners this week at our annual user conference, HPE Protect 2016.

A Little Dose of Reality

Today’s security threat landscape is vast and daunting. Breaches and attacks are growing more frequent, sophisticated and serious. Over the last year, we’ve seen the impact of large-scale data breaches such as the Office of Personnel Management and Experian/T-Mobile, as well as a spike in ransomware and SWIFT attacks. Furthermore, adversaries are more organized and are essentially running businesses much like we do. They know more about us than ever before, and are essentially building out their own big data stores and marketplaces, attaching monetary value to personal information about us – names, passwords, social security numbers, fingerprints and more.

At the same time, the pace of technological change as organizations embrace cloud, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility is unprecedented. This change is also bringing new levels of interconnectivity that enhances productivity, but also makes it easier for attackers to wreak havoc. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 25 percent of enterprise attacks will be through IoT, which means as an industry we need to get ahead of these threats.

Closer to Data, Faster than Attackers

As organizations strive to keep pace with the ever-evolving threat environment, there must be an overarching shift in security strategy that moves away from control point focused security and closer to the data itself. In-house application development is also becoming commonplace, and new app releases are being churned out in days versus weeks. Applications are essentially the new perimeter – yet they are more vulnerable than ever.

At the same time, our adversaries are moving faster and we need to be able to prevent and detect their attacks, and respond before the damage is done. This means giving security analysts more visibility and the ability to react more quickly.

Keeping it Intuitive and Simple

There is a major pivot happening in security, and the ability to leverage analytics to drive intelligent security operations is key. Analytics should be leveraged for more than identifying threats, but providing the ability for security analysts to intuitively prioritize these threats and accelerate investigation and response. We must arm Security Operations Centers with the intelligence and tools to become faster than the attacker.

Today, I’m excited to stand on stage at HPE Protect and introduce innovations that will help customers get closer to the data and operationalize security analytics. Our new security offerings are built around an investment in open architectures and partner ecosystems, and a focus on making powerful capabilities effective and intuitive. It’s about keeping it simple and working together to deliver solutions that protect what matters, are faster than the attackers, and help CIOs get more sleep at night.