Published on the 18/01/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
IT professionals need to prepare for a new KPI that will track their ability to manage system security “dwell time”…
A typical security problem lurks in an enterprise system for an average of over 200 days, according to Maurizio Garavello, VP of sales for Forcepoint in Asia Pacific. Forcepoint is the new name for the Raytheon/Websense entity in which Raytheon has already invested to the tune of $US1.7 billion as it seeks a bigger slice of the global enterprise security market.
Garavello said that Forcepoint was taking a fresh approach when it came to marketing security solutions. “Companies don’t need a vendor spreading fear, they need solutions. They don’t need to learn about the new malware that was discovered last night,” he said.
Be that as it may, Forcepoint is still looking to scare the bejesus out of IT professionals with its “dwell time” measure, which Garavello said would track the days between the time a system was infected and when it was cleaned out.
“If we as a security provider can say, click this button and measure the dwell time…it is a KPI to measure the security progress of the company,” he said.
Forcepoint wants to make more of a splash in the global security business which is growing rapidly. Gartner has estimated that global spending on IT security rose 4.7 percent last year to $US75.4 billion as companies fend off increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Garavello said that the renamed organisation brings together the experience of Raytheon, which has deep military and intelligence agency understanding, with the commercial nous of the internet and data protection services that Websense delivered. Websense was bought by Vista Equity Partners for $US906 million in 2013, and last year dropped into the Raytheon/Vista Equity owned structure.
It has also fleshed out its product and services portfolio by completing the purchase of the Stonesoft firewall and Sidewinder proxy firewall technologies and teams from Intel Security this month. Garavello said that the heritage of Raytheon on the user side, Websense with its data heritage, and the network security credentials of Stonesoft meant that the combined entity allows enterprises to move “forward without fear” – though IT professionals facing a new dwell time KPI may question the aptness of that motto.
