ChannelWorld.in, Strategic insights for solution providers

Coviello: If there’s a silver lining to the cloud that was over us from April through over the summer, it is the fact that we’ve been engaged with customers at a strategic level as never before, and they want to know in detail what happened to us, how we responded, what tools we used, what was effective and what was not.

Coviello: Again, a silver lining to us being attacked, I’ve heard it time and time again, “If it can happen to you then I guess it can happen to anybody,” or, “My CIO said, ‘Oh my god if it happened to them let’s redouble our efforts, let’s review everything we’re doing.’”  It’s kind of gotten to even a CEO level. I was actually brought into a major money center bank in Europe at the CIO’s request to talk to the CEO of the bank and his whole management team about the threats and vulnerabilities that exist today. The reason he brought me in was they were doing an overhaul of their IT infrastructure which included the development of a private cloud. Even though it’s an internally controlled cloud he wanted the management group to understand the security ramifications of the infrastructure change that the bank was about to go through.  I’m at a [similar] level with Fortune 10 oil and gas, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals. I am getting in at levels that are unprecedented in terms of the contacts and the people I’m talking to.

Coviello: You would like to think that people would come to these conclusions and act on them more quickly but there’s such competition -- whether it’s budget, whether it’s business initiative, whether it’s overhauling their own infrastructure, whether it’s this crazy economy we’re working with -- it never goes as fast as you think it should or could.
I’m in a position now where as much as I’ve preached for three or four years that we have an opportunity to get it right this time as we virtualize our environments and we go to cloud [by building] security in, it just isn’t happening and we’re making the same mistakes all over again. I don’t fault the infrastructure vendors – it’s just unfortunately the way the world works sometimes that people want to get the benefits of a new technology wave and don’t always think through all the security ramifications.

Coviello: What they are aware of is how much they themselves and how much their businesses have changed in having more reliance on the Internet and on Web applications. They’re not oblivious to the impact of technology on their operations. They’re clearly looking to not only take more advantage of technology but also to wring cost out of these ridiculously outdated IT infrastructures where people are spending 60%-70% just to maintain old client-server, old mainframe, old ways of doing things and not getting mileage out of their IT infrastructure dollar.

Increasingly, the more mature companies get that as never before, and then they see that in the context of all these attacks. I do think there is more awareness, so they themselves are less reactive and they’re more proactive in wanting to know not only how technology can benefit their business but also the ramifications of using that technology in terms of the operational risk to business.

Coviello: I don’t think there’s any question of that, and as I’ve said, I’ve seen it time and time again in discussions I’ve had with people and the silver lining to our breaches is people literally did say if it could happen to those guys we’ve got to be more aware of it, which is really giving us an entree to having these strategic discussions as never before. Customers do understand that we were able to handle that attack and mitigate the damage better than anyone and that’s put us clearly in demand to talk to a lot of customers.

Coviello: Yeah. Believe me we are not the only ones. We are one of the few that’s been forthcoming but for us to have handled it any other way would have been kind of a dereliction of duty. When we go into detail about the attack, I think people are actually impressed with the speed with which we were able to see the attack in progress. We were still unable to keep [hackers] from getting away with at least something. But we were able to minimize the damage, and more importantly, get to our customers timely enough so they could protect themselves to mitigate risk associated with the damage. We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of credit with our customer base that we certainly haven’t gotten in the press.