Prediction beats prevention

It is a human tendency to romanticise the past, to think what existed yesterday was bigger and better. There are examples where this is true, but the same cannot be said for technology and, in particular, security, says HEIN KERN regional sales manager for SA at RSA.

“If you think of where we are today, a lot what we still do is based on historical prevention and signature based technologies,” says Hein Kern, the newly appointed Regional Sales Manager for Southern Africa at RSA. “In the past companies would use various flavours of antivirus, firewalls, hoping that would be sufficient to control their (perimeter bound) IT environment.

“But the sophistication, speed and types of threats have grown considerably. Fortunately security solutions have not stayed reactive, but grown to enable a new type of predictive intelligence. The real difference between modern offerings is how easily they can integrate and grow with not only those challenges, but a company’s infrastructure investments.”

Kern is no stranger to security, having managed it as part of his portfolio at companies such as Computer Associates and IBM. But since joining EMC in 2011, Kern has seen how important convergence among the many parts of the third platform is, as well as the underlying role security plays in that. The third platform is a departure from the so-called second platform. It’s a shift away from static silos and towards the agility of data center platforms married with the cloud, big data and other modern business enablers:

“With EMC and moving to the third platform –  security is always at play within the four elements mobile, cloud, big data and social

After building on experience in EMC, Kern has moved to RSA, part of EMC’s Federation of companies. He is now eager to sharpen that focus around the role of security in enterprises:

“RSA is aligned with the broader EMC federation. It’s about doing new things better, making gains incremental and achievable. RSA focuses on the four tenets of modern security: access management, advanced security operations, governance risk compliance, and combatting online fraud”. The combination of these four and the power of integration between them deliver greater visibility to give better analysis and more effective action.”

That said, Kern and his team are not aiming to force clients into the new direction, but instead help them build towards it: “At RSA we don’t ignore previous investments. We can work together with previously acquired tools and pull that into the security operations centre environment. So you don’t lose that investment.”

Local enterprises are aware of this journey, he added. There is great and growing awareness that prevention is not that effective anymore. Local companies want to adopt security frameworks that helps manage risk and compliance across the organisation.

“From our dealings with enterprise clients, they are looking towards an integrated enterprise governance, risk and compliance capability but still perform core GRC tasks in siloed and often manual toolsets. With our use-case approach, so we can start small with a certain use-case to enable the journey towards an organizational maturity that an integrated eGRC solution provides.

Security is a bigger concern for companies than ever before, a rising tide that is not subsiding any time soon. But that growing risk has also delivered incredible security solutions that cover more bases that traditional prevention ever could. Kern and his team at RSA are ready to help customers take advantage of such developments, building the third platform future modern businesses thrive on.