The Art of security

RSA chief executive Art Coviello talks to ChannelWeb about a testing year for the vendor

This year has been something of an annus horribilis for EMC-owned security vendor RSA. In March, the firm hit the headlines after suffering a customer data hack. Since then, RSA has had to weather an onslaught of flak from rival vendors, the media and even some disgruntled partners.

The fallout from the attack was not all bad news though, as RSA was quick to buy out networking monitoring vendor NetWitness, the firm whose technology helped it detect and combat the breach. Last month marked the launch of NetWitness Spectrum, the first major product release since the acquisition.

Chief executive Art Coviello was in London this month for the RSA Conference Europe. ChannelWeb caught up with him to discuss maintaining channel trust, predatory rivals and the future of security.

How would you characterise the state of the security industry this year?
2011 has been a year of headlines about breaches, but that is the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately the press has a tendency to lump the attacks together; the reality is it is different attackers with different motivations.
From a security perspective, you have to know who is going to attack you if you are going to do a better job of protecting yourself. Perimeter security is either not efficient or not effective enough for today’s attacks.

What can security vendors do about that?
We have to think differently about security. We have to start by understanding the IT environment. If you added 50,000 cars to the M4 commute, but maintained the same rate of speed, would you be surprised if there were a lot more multi-car pile-ups?
On top of that, there is mobility, consumerisation of IT and cloud. Is it any wonder that there are more successful attacks going on? This is not the fault of security professionals. It is the times in which we live.
Having said that, we have to change the way we are doing security. We need to start a more granular management of risk. To do that you need tools, you need governance, you need risk management and compliance. But to close the loop you need to aggregate lots of information and correlate it in ways we have not been able to before.

What does this mean for the channel?
It is an unbelievable opportunity. They need to be the best - this is not transactional stuff. In the transactional stuff, I’m sure they will continue to do OK, but a lot of that traditional stuff is becoming commoditised.
These things need experts. And the good news is, if you develop this kind of expertise, a good proportion of your customer base will not have it. Resellers can be more strategic than they have ever been.

Do resellers currently possess the skills to sell this kind of technology?
This stuff is complex, but not necessarily complicated. Like a ball of string that you cannot unravel. We are continuing to work with resellers to train them up. The interesting thing about the channel community is that they are entrepreneurial and they tend to sense out these kind of opportunities for advancement. For us, in Europe particularly as opposed to the US, the channel community tends to be a bit more resourceful and takes the initiative.

Did you feel you had your partners’ support in the aftermath of the attack?
I could not be more grateful and appreciative of the role that partners played in getting the word out and giving the customers the right advice. The channel was instrumental in trying to minimise the damage.

A number of rivals were quick to try to cash in - have the tokenless 2FA vendors gained any headway in light of the attack?
We have been very conscious of them, but they have not been making much headway. It is one thing for a competitor to try to take advantage; you can hardly blame them, on one level. But there were some outrageous and incorrect claims that bordered on the unethical. But we are focused on customers, rather than competitors.

Should the security industry as a whole be working together more to combat attacks?
We need a strong ecosystem of vendors, end users and government. There is a lot of work to be done. We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with our competitors, industry groups and with governments.

How far off is the industry to achieving that kind of cohesion?
It is like eating an elephant one bite at a time. We try to partner with as many companies as we can where our technologies are integrated. On a more macro level, we support a number of groups through information sharing. We are doing our bit to build awareness at a macro level and build an ecosystem.

How mature is the UK market for RSA?
The UK market is a fabulous market for us, not surprisingly for an American company. It is our leading country in terms of revenue in EMEA.

Why should resellers work with RSA as opposed to your rivals?
We are a subsidiary of EMC, but we remain an independent division. So many security vendors have been swallowed up by bigger companies and become invisible.
Not only do we have a set of products that leads the marketplace, we have a great strategy, we have very capable partners, a channel-friendly approach to distribution, with capable people running [the channel] - and we have not lost our identity or our visibility.