Q&A: Mobile app security should not be an afterthought

As enterprises struggle to keep up with their internal demand for mobile apps, more are turning to rapid development workflows. What does this mean for security?

As enterprises struggle to keep up with their internal demand for mobile apps, more are turning to more speedy development workflows, such as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) , which essentially calls for mobile development teams to focus on the highest return on effort when compared to risk when choosing apps to develop, and features to build within them. That is: focus on apps and capabilities that users are actually going to use and skip those apps and features they won’t.

Sounds simple, but what does that mean when it comes to security? We know application security is one of the most important aspects of data security, but if software teams are moving more quickly than ever to push apps out, security and quality assurance needs to be along for the process.
MORE ON CSO:Mobile Security Survival Guide

The flip side is minimum apps and features could mean less attack surface. To get some answers on the state of mobile app security and securing the MVP, we reached out to Isaac Potoczny-Jones research lead, computer security with a computer security research and development firm Galois.

Potoczny-Jones has been a project lead with Galois since 2004, is an active open source developer in cryptography and programming languages. Isaac has led many successful security and identity management projects for government organizations including (Navy, DOD), (DHS), federated identity for the Open Science Grid (DOE), and mobile password-free authentication (DARPA), and authentication for anti- forgery in hardware devices (DARPA).
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Please tell us a little about Galois and your role there in security.

Galois is a computer security research and development firm out here in Portland, Ore. We do a lot of work with the US federal government, been around since 1999 and I've been here for 11 years now. I think a lot about this topic, I really appreciate and employ myself the lean methodologies for product development, and I love the lean startup approach. I also do security analysis for companies, so I've gone into a number of start-ups too and looked at their security profile for their products or their infrastructure, and help them to develop a security program. I've definitely seen both sides of the issue as far as where MVP thinking leads you.

What are you seeing out within organizations today when it comes to mobile security?

There's definitely a lot more development in mobile happening. The best practices in mobile aren't as well developed as best practices for the web. That's getting a little bit better.Consider HTTPS. What we saw for quite some time was something that on the Web is relatively straightforward, which HTTPS is. People were doing it wrong on mobile for years before anyone really noticed. There's a lot you can get wrong with HTTPS, and they were getting it all wrong. As people move over to mobile they are definitely having to relearn some of the lessons we learned over the years.
"A lot of things are easy to add at the end with security, but sometimes you run into systems that are just kind of broken from the foundation. As with any of these things, the later you catch it, the costlier it's going to be be."

Password security is another one of those. People began to make passwords on websites a lot more robust. You can't just have a four or five letter password anymore on most websites. But because mobile devices are so difficult to type password into, a lot of sites have relaxed those password rules. In reality, the threat is just the same as it always has been.

What impact do you see the minimum viable product, or minimum viable app, trend?
On the MVP front, there's a very fascinating challenge with security because security is a non-functional requirement. I tend to like the lean scrum methodology. I don't know if you're familiar with that one, but I can use that one as an example. They're all kind of similar in some ways. They emphasize features, they emphasize things the users can see. They emphasize testing out ideas, and getting them into the market. Testing them, gathering metrics about how effective they are, and using that as feedback into the product. That's a really good idea about how to develop a product. But because even just the terminology, minimum viable product, it is really emphasizing minimizing.

It emphasizes getting rid of what you don't need. Those things together, minimizing things and really having an emphasis on what the user can do and see, that makes it so that non-functional requirements are kind of an afterthought. You have to squint to figure out how to apply non-functional requirements like security to a lot of these processes like scrum.

I would imagine with an MVP teams want to move the app out as quickly as possible, so they don’t want to spend a lot of time threat modeling and going through a lot of additional process, because that’s all adding to more development time. So there seems to be a natural friction between the goals of MVP and good security.

It's absolutely a friction. It's challenging because securing is mostly invisible. That means good security and bad security look exactly the same, until something goes wrong. Security is really visible when something is broken or somebody gets hacked and then you make the news. Then it kind of blows up in your face. We've seen this a few times, I don't know how many start-ups it's killed, it's probably killed a few, but it's definitely cost a lot of start ups when their first major news coverage is that they were hacked.

What are some ways organizations can ease that tension when it exists? Is there a way to bring security in so it's not too obtrusive? Is there a way to separate out apps by data type? And possibly greenlight MVP apps that don’t touch more sensitive data, and give a closer look at those apps that do?

I think that's a good approach. As you point out, one way is to say, let's see if we can do an MVP with data that's not as sensitive so you won't have to focus as strongly on security. Nowadays, it's a little more challenging. Even the minimum things you do you will need security. It kind of doesn't matter what your data is, you will get targeted, you will get attacked, and even if it's just with these automated bots that run around the Internet attacking everything. They'll use your infrastructure for sending spam at the very least, if that's all they can do. To me, the approach is you have to implement some of the industry best practices as far as the OWASP Top 10. You have to believe that security is an important part of a minimum viable product to start to even begin to get these user stories in there.

What I like to tell people is think about user stories, even negative user stories or things like that are, as a user, I don't want to see my personal information leaked on the internet because I've shared something sensitive in your app or your website, I've stored something sensitive in your website. I don't want to see that in the hands of people who will use my private information against me.

That sounds like something a security team could put a guide together, or put in place a checkpoint on whether an app can go through. For instance, if the app has certain conditions that are true, or one of these conditions that are true, the app has to go through a security review. If not, it’s OK for a security light approach within certain guidelines.

That'd be perfect. Typically these lean approaches have at least some kind of testing methodology built in, or acceptance testing. Or, as some of them call say, "What's your definition of 'done'?" The first step is just saying, "We're going to include security in these definitions of done," and once you've at least penetrated that level, which I don't think a lot of people have, but once they get that, then they’re going to at least do the right things. You're either going to start to build it either into the user stories or the acceptance testing.

But you can’t leave it to just be at the end of the process. If you leave security acceptance testing toward the end, and naturally your schedule is going to slip. Then you'll get to the security testing and find there's a lot more work to do. Then you'll be in this unfortunate decision of either having to fix things and let your schedule slip, or choose to let something go out the door that's not secure.

The real tragedy is when a system is kind of inherently insecure, it was built in a really insecure way that requires major rework, because you didn't think about security at the beginning. A lot of things are easy to add at the end with security, but sometimes you run into systems that are just kind of broken from the foundation. As with any of these things, the later you catch it, the costlier it's going to be be.

If you're looking at your to-do list, whatever that to-do list is, whether it's a list of stories or a big list of tasks and action items, you should be recognizing some security issues in there, as you go. You'll get to a point, you're developing something and one of your developers hopefully will say, "Well, look, our system is vulnerable to whatever cross site request forgery, cross site scripting attack. Which any system that's not designed to protect against it, is going to be.

If you look at your bug list, you should see that pop up there at some point. Some of these security issues will come up during development, because nothing will be perfect. That'll be an early indicator.

If you don't have anything, if you look at your bug list and you don't see anything, if your developers aren't actively talking about security or saying, "We're going to have to add some tasks for security," you're going to say, "Well, I want to add that feature for you but that's going to have an impact on security." If you're not hearing it as part of the conversation, then there's going to be a problem.

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Six Biggest Business Security Risks and How You Can Fight Back

IT and security experts discuss the leading causes of security breaches and what your organization can do to reduce them.

Security breaches again made big news in 2014. Yet despite years of headline stories about security leaks and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and repeated admonishments from security professionals that businesses (and individuals) needed to do a better job protecting sensitive data, many businesses are still unprepared or not properly protected from a variety of security threats.

Indeed, according to Trustwave’s recent 2014 State of Risk Report, which surveyed 476 IT professionals about security weaknesses, a majority of businesses had no or only a partial system in place for controlling and tracking sensitive data.

So, what can companies do to better protect themselves and their customers’, sensitive data from security threats? CIO.com queried dozens of security and IT experts to find out. Following are the six most likely sources, or causes, of security breaches and what businesses can, and should, do to protect against them.

Risk No. 1: Disgruntled Employees
“Internal attacks are one of the biggest threats facing your data and systems,” states Cortney Thompson, CTO of Green House Data. “Rogue employees, especially members of the IT team with knowledge of and access to networks, data centers and admin accounts, can cause serious damage,” he says. Indeed, “there [were] rumors that the Sony hack was not [carried out by] North Korea but [was actually] an inside job.

Solution: “The first step in mitigating the risk of privileged account exploitation is to identify all privileged accounts and credentials [and] immediately terminate those that are no longer in use or are connected to employees that are no longer at the company,” says Adam Bosnian, executive vice president, CyberArk.

“Next, closely monitor, control and manage privileged credentials to prevent exploitation. Finally, companies should implement necessary protocols and infrastructure to track, log and record privileged account activity [and create alerts, to] allow for a quick response to malicious activity and mitigate potential damage early in the attack cycle.”

Risk No. 2: Careless or Uninformed Employees
“A careless worker who forgets [his] unlocked iPhone in a taxi is as dangerous as a disgruntled user who maliciously leaks information to a competitor,” says Ray Potter, CEO, SafeLogic. Similarly, employees who are not trained in security best practices and have weak passwords, visit unauthorized websites and/or click on links in suspicious emails or open email attachments pose an enormous security threat to their employers’ systems and data.

Solution: “Train employees on cyber security best practices and offer ongoing support,” says Bill Carey, vice presdient of Marketing for RoboForm. “Some employees may not know how to protect themselves online, which can put your business data at risk,” he explains. So it’s essential to “hold training sessions to help employees learn how to manage passwords and avoid hacking through criminal activity like phishing and keylogger scams. Then provide ongoing support to make sure employees have the resources they need.”

Also, “make sure employees use strong passwords on all devices,” he adds. “Passwords are the first line of defense, so make sure employees use passwords that have upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols,” Carey explains.

“It’s also important to use a separate password for each registered site and to change it every 30 to 60 days,” he continues. “A password management system can help by automating this process and eliminating the need for staff to remember multiple passwords.”

Encryption is also essential.

“As long as you have deployed validated encryption as part of your security strategy, there is hope,” says Potter. “Even if the employee hasn’t taken personal precautions to lock their phone, your IT department can execute a selective wipe by revoking the decryption keys specifically used for the company data.”

To be extra safe, “implement multifactor authentication such as One Time Password (OTP), RFID, smart card, fingerprint reader or retina scanning [to help ensure] that users are in fact who you believe they are,” adds Rod Simmons, product group manager, BeyondTrust. “This helps mitigate the risk of a breach should a password be compromised.”

Risk No. 3: Mobile Devices (BYOD)
“Data theft is at high vulnerability when employees are using mobile devices [particularly their own] to share data, access company information, or neglect to change mobile passwords,” explains Jason Cook,CTO & vice president of Security, BT Americas. “According to a BT study, mobile security breaches have affected more than two-thirds (68 percent) of global organizations in the last 12 months.”

Indeed, “as more enterprises embrace BYOD, they face risk exposure from those devices on the corporate network (behind the firewall, including via the VPN) in the event an app installs malware or other Trojan software that can access the device's network connection,” says Ari Weil, vice president, Product Marketing, Yottaa.

Solution: Make sure you have a carefully spelled out BYOD policy. “With a BYOD policy in place, employees are better educated on device expectations and companies can better monitor email and documents that are being downloaded to company or employee-owned devices,” says Piero DePaoli, senior director, Global Product Marketing, Symantec. “Monitoring effectively will provide companies with visibility into their mobile data loss risk, and will enable them to quickly pinpoint exposures if mobile devices are lost or stolen.”

Similarly, companies should “implement mobile security solutions that protect both corporate data and access to corporate systems while also respecting user’s privacy through containerization,” advises Nicko van Someren, CTO, Good Technology. “By securely separating business applications and business data on users’ devices, containerization ensures corporate content, credentials and configurations stay encrypted and under IT’s control, adding a strong layer of defense to once vulnerable a points of entry.”

You can also “mitigate BYOD risks with a hybrid cloud,” adds Matthew Dornquast, CEO and cofounder, Code42. “As unsanctioned consumer apps and devices continue to creep into the workplace, IT should look to hybrid and private clouds for mitigating potential risks brought on by this workplace trend,” he says. “Both options generally offer the capacity and elasticity of the public cloud to manage the plethora of devices and data, but with added security and privacy—such as the ability to keep encryption keys on-site no matter where the data is stored—for managing apps and devices across the enterprise.”

Risk No. 4: Cloud Applications
Solution: “The best defense [against a cloud-based threat] is to defend at the data level using strong encryption, such as AES 256-bit, recognized by experts as the crypto gold standard and retain the keys exclusively to prevent any third party from accessing the data even if it resides on a public cloud,” says Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud. “As many of 2014’s breaches indicate, not enough companies are using data level cloud encryption to protect sensitive information.”

Risk No. 5: Unpatched or Unpatchable Devices
“These are network devices, such as routers, [servers] and printers that employ software or firmware in their operation, yet either a patch for a vulnerability in them was not yet created or sent, or their hardware was not designed to enable them to be updated following the discovery of vulnerabilities,” says Shlomi Boutnaru, cofounder & CTO, CyActive. “This leaves an exploitable device in your network, waiting for attackers to use it to gain access to your data.

A leading breach candidate: the soon-to-be unsupported Windows Server 2003.

“On July 14, 2015, Microsoft will no longer provide support for Windows Server 2003 – meaning organizations will no longer receive patches or security updates for this software,” notes Laura Iwan, senior vice president of Programs, Center for Internet Security.

With over 10 million physical Windows 2003 servers still in use, and millions more in virtual use, according to Forrester, “expect these outdated servers to become a prime target for anyone interested in penetrating the networks where these vulnerable servers reside,” she says.

Solution: Institute a patch management program to ensure that devices, and software, are kept up to date at all times.

“Step one is to deploy vulnerability management technology to look on your network and see what is, and isn't, up to date,” says Greg Kushto, director of the Security Practice at Force 3. “The real key, however, is to have a policy in place where everyone agrees that if a certain piece of equipment is not updated or patched within a certain amount of time, it is taken offline.”

To avoid potential problems re Windows Server 2003, “identify all Windows Server 2003 instances; inventory all the software and functions of each server; prioritize each system based on risk and criticality; and map out a migration strategy and then execute it,” Iwan advises. And if you are unable to execute all steps in house, hire someone certified to assist you.
Risk No. 6: Third-party Service Providers

“As technology becomes more specialized and complex, companies are relying more on outsourcers and vendors to support and maintain systems,” notes Matt Dircks, CEO, Bomgar. “For example, restaurant franchisees often outsource the maintenance and management of their point-of-sale (POS) systems to a third-party service provider.”

However, “these third-parties typically use remote access tools to connect to the company’s network, but don’t always follow security best practices,” he says. “For example, they’ll use the same default password to remotely connect to all of their clients. If a hacker guesses that password, he immediately has a foothold into all of those clients’ networks.”

Indeed, “many of the high profile and extremely expensive breaches of the past year (think Home Depot, Target, etc.) were due to contractor’s login credentials being stolen,” states Matt Zanderigo, Product Marketing Manager, ObserveIT. “According to some recent reports, the majority of data breaches – 76 percent – are attributed to the exploitation of remote vendor access channels,” he says. “Even contractors with no malicious intent could potentially damage your systems or leave you open to attack.”

“This threat is multiplied exponentially due to the lack of vetting done by companies before allowing third parties to access their network,” adds Adam Roth, cybersecurity specialist from Dynamic Solutions International. “A potential data breach typically does not directly attack the most valuable server, but is more a game of leap frog, going from a low level computer that is less secure, then pivoting to other devices and gaining privileges,” he explains.

“Companies do a fairly good job ensuring critical servers avoid malware from the Internet,” he continues. “But most companies are pretty horrible at keeping these systems segmented from other systems that are much easier to compromise.”

Solution: “Companies need to validate that any third party follows remote access security best practices, such as enforcing multifactor authentication, requiring unique credentials for each user, setting least-privilege permissions and capturing a comprehensive audit trail of all remote access activity,” says Dircks.

In particular, “disable third-party accounts as soon as they are no longer needed; monitor failed login attempts; and have a red flag alerting you to an attack sent right away,” says Roth.
General Guidance on Dealing With Breaches

“Most organizations now realize that a breach is not a matter of if but when,” says Rob Sadowski, director of Technology Solutions for RSA. To minimize the impact of a security breach and leak, conduct a risk assessment to identify where your valuable data resides and what controls or procedures are in place to protect it.

Then, “build out a comprehensive incident response [and disaster recovery/business continuity] plan, determining who will be involved, from IT, to legal, to PR, to executive management, and test it.”

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2015 11 predictions for security

It’s tough to know what the security landscape will look like in six months, never mind a year. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

Predictions for 2015
In the world of business, correctly seeing the future even a few months out can provide a leg up on the competition or, in the case of cybersecurity, on ever-present attackers. A missed guess can leave one scrambling to catch up.

So, here are some predictions for 2015 on security from research firms Gartner and Forrester Research, and from Arthur W. Coviello Jr., executive chairman of RSA.

Nation states vs. private sector
(Coviello) Nation-state cyber-attacks will continue to evolve and accelerate but the damage will be increasingly borne by the private sector.

“With no one actively working on the development of acceptable norms of digital behavior … we can expect this covert digital warfare to continue,” Coviello said. And it will increasingly be private sector firms that will be, “the intended victim or the unwitting pawn in an attack on other companies.”

The rise of integrated threat intelligence
(Gartner) Internet of Things (IoT) device revenue growth of almost 30% will create new vulnerabilities and security demands relating to both physical and digital environments. The expected convergence of IoT security and information security technologies, along with increased regulatory activity directed at protecting critical infrastructure, will drive demand for integrated threat intelligence capabilities, including IoT-related threat data feeds.

More money, much more scrutiny
(Forrester) Security budgets will see double-digit growth in sectors outside of banking and the defense industrial base.

The downside to those increases will be an enormous amount of scrutiny and much higher expectations, not just from business leaders and counterparts in technology management, but also from customers, government agencies, and privacy watchdog groups.

The quest for a uniform threat language
(Gartner) The drive toward a common framework adopting a uniform language, such as Structured Threat Information Expression, will accelerate as a result of the complexity and challenges brought by the need to integrate IoT security data inputs for indicator of compromise (IOC) detection.

Pragmatic privacy
(Coviello) A maturing privacy debate will become more pragmatic and balanced. Prospects for responsible privacy policies and intelligence sharing legislation that would better protect our privacy may improve. One test of this prediction will be the outcome of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which may reach a final form in 2015.

More billions of things, more billions of risks
(Gartner) 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30% from 2014, creating disruption, continued opportunities and continued risk.

“Organizations must straddle the tension of all the information available from smart things by balancing their desire to collect and analyze it with the risk of its loss or misuse,” according to Steve Prentice, vice president and Gartner Fellow.

Find the breach, botch the response
(Forrester) With new investments in breach detection, a large majority of companies (60%) will discover a breach, or more likely be informed of it by a third party like a government agency, security blogger or a customer.

But they will likely botch the response, given that only 21% of enterprises report that improving incident response is a critical priority. That means more cases of customers’ trust undermined or corporate reputations dragged through the mud.

Unhealthy exposure
(Coviello) While retail will remain an ongoing target, well-organized cyber criminals will increasingly turn their attention to stealing PHI – personal health information. It is not as well secured, is very lucrative to monetize in the cybercrime economy, and is largely held by organizations without the means to defend against sophisticated attacks – healthcare providers.

Competing on privacy
(Forrester) Privacy will be a competitive differentiator, not just through lip service, but action – appropriate privacy policies, enforcement and building privacy considerations into business operations and the products or services offered to customers.

That will require the leadership of a privacy champion – a Chief Privacy Officer, Data Protection Officer, or privacy professional. Today, about a third of security decision-makers in North America and Europe view privacy as a competitive differentiator. That will increase to half by the end of 2015.

The essential, more secure, mobile payment option
(Gartner) A renewed interest in mobile payment will arise, together with a significant increase in mobile commerce, due in part to the increased security features of Apple Pay and similar near-field communication (NFC) efforts by competitors such as Google.

As device manufacturers and application developers improve usability and functionality and address users' security concerns, devices will become even more of an essential tool for customers, particularly the younger demographics.

Beware the Botnet of Things
(Coviello) The increase of machine-to-human and machine-to-machine interaction will only exacerbate the situation described in a tweet this past year as: “Who needs zero days when you’ve got stupid?” Get ready for the Botnet of Things. This trend along with the strong growth of IoT in the healthcare sector and the accompanying risks to PHI, has ominous implications.

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Is Cisco Back (as an enterprise security leader)?

Sourcefire, architecture, and services place Cisco in the catbird seat for emerging enterprise cybersecurity requirements if Cisco remains aggressive

It wasn't too long ago that Cisco was a dominant force in information security technology. The company was a market leader in firewalls, IDS/IPS, and email security and was actively pushing products for endpoint security and SIEM as well as security "blades" for Catalyst switches. Heck, Cisco even articulated a bold vision of "self-defending networks" with security policy, enforcement, and intelligence all baked into the network.

Somewhere around 2008 however, Cisco security went into a prolonged slump. Cisco security products didn't offer the performance of rivals like Crossbeam (now Blue Coat), Juniper, or McAfee. Cisco missed markets like next-generation firewalls, opening the door for savvy startups like FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, and Stonesoft. Cisco products such as the Cisco Security Agent (Okena) and MARS (Protego) were abject failures and discontinued by the company. Finally, Cisco's security team itself imploded as management and engineering leaders fled San Jose for greener valley pastures.

Cisco recognized its cybersecurity death spiral and began executing on a comeback strategy around 2011, building a new team, innovating, and acquiring a market leader in Sourcefire. Based upon what I saw the week at CiscoLive, I believe that the company has turned a corner. Cisco can now return to a leadership role in enterprise security technology because:

1. Its security architecture is just about ready for primetime. Cisco deserves kudos for the way it integrated Sourcefire products and people into its security division. For example, Cisco has a "FireAMP everywhere" strategy that will place advanced malware detection technology on Cisco email and web security products and various endpoint devices. Additionally, Cisco is actively filling architecture holes with acquisitions like ThreatGRID for network and cloud "sandboxing" to detect malware threats. Finally, Cisco has momentum in other areas like TrustSec and ISE. Its soon-to-be-released pxGrid completes these granular network access control offerings with a middleware repository for publish-and-subscribe data about endpoints and users. All of the puzzle pieces are in place today or arriving soon.

2. Cisco is investing in services. New security requirements are challenging to all organizations - even those with deep security skills and resources. Cisco recognizes this gap and is building a global services organization to offer help. As of now the professional services staff is relatively small but it is highly-skilled and growing. In the meantime, Cisco is also jumping into the managed security services market with both feet. For example, it now offers a big data security analytics managed service for incident detection, investigations, and forensics. While Cisco uses a physical Hadoop cluster on the customer premise, the service is fully managed by Cisco security analysts and customers pay for it on an annual subscription basis. Cisco will continue to expand upon managed security solutions moving forward.

3. Cisco is well positioned to align security with IT transformation. As a large IT provider, Cisco is in the middle of numerous IT initiatives around cloud computing, data center transformation, mobile computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT). This gives Cisco a great opportunity to integrate its security portfolio everywhere. For example, Cisco can work with large customers to add Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) functionality to their data center networks. Once customers are comfortable with Cisco's software-based network control for configuration, provisioning, and segmentation, Cisco can introduce a host of L4-7 security functionality as part of an overall transformation project. Given its role in these other ongoing IT initiatives, Cisco has a clear advantage over pure-play security technology vendors.

Aside from these advances, Cisco also (author's comment: Finally!) created an overlay salesforce focused on security sales alone. This could give Cisco the right skill set to sell security architecture technologies and services at the CISO level.

In my humble opinion, Cisco is moving in the right direction and the company certainly has the resources to continue to acquire point products and invest in its organization. That said, Cisco still has some work ahead. To continue on the comeback trail, Cisco must:

1. Compete at the product and solution layer. CISOs want to build enterprise security architectures, but this transition will take time as point tools are replaced with new security technology components built for integration. This means that vendors will need best-of-breed tactical products, integration middleware, and project management skills to build an architecture over time. As a networking vendor, Cisco doesn't have much street credibility in areas like endpoint security, middleware, or security analytics - especially since it walked away from some of these areas over the last few years, hanging some of its customers out to dry. Cisco's done a lot of work on the product side, now it must convince the market that it offers leading architectural and services skills for the long-term. Finally, Cisco needs to be able to work at the CISO level on detailed security architecture implementation plans that fit their security, financial, and industry needs.

2. Play the "open" card. Those of us with grey hair remember Cisco's "embrace and extend" attitude toward industry standards. Cisco was onboard as long as it controlled the standard, tweaked them for its own feature set, and maintained proprietary ownership of the code. Surprisingly, Cisco has become much more flexible about opening up its security software strategy. For example, Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire made the company the steward of SNORT and ClamAV and it continues to encourage and support each community. Cisco's big data security analytics services is based upon open source tools like Hadoop, MapR, and Mahout that can be customized by customers with open source tools. Finally, Cisco is an active member of the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and is working to align its pxGrid with future plans for IF-MAP. Cisco could greatly benefit by going further and becoming a visible champion of open security standards henceforth. To do so, Cisco should promote promoting standards, become a visible contributor to open source projects, trumpet the community benefits of open security standards, and encourage other vendors to join in.

3. Deliver a real security management portal. Cisco's Achilles heel has always been management software that was too complex, required too many management consoles, and was geared toward CCIEs with CLI chops. This simply won't fly for an integrated enterprise security architecture. Without a simple but powerful GUI-based management portal for central command-and-control, Cisco product and architecture progress will all go for naught.

Cisco still faces real competition as FireEye, IBM, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, and Trend Micro are building their own enterprise security architectures that span networks and endpoints. Others like HP and Symantec could easily acquire their way in. To truly succeed, Cisco must remain humble, execute flawlessly, and continue to recruit top talent. A difficult but achievable strategy.

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