Security - challenges, expectations and solutions

BANGALORE, INDIA: Stemming out of the fact that there are over 500 vendors vying for their piece of the cake in the security marketplace, Check Point’s USP is to reduce the complexity and provide solutions that are all inclusive, or give the choice to the customer to choose what he wants and expand at any given point of time depending on business objectives.

According to Gil Shwed, chairman and CEO of Check Point, the company's biggest learning has been the fact that each customer is currently in a different stage of deployment, and offering a set stack of products would only mean that he would never make total use of it. At the same time, most of the customers desire optimum security with minimum complexity at an attractive price point.

“This is precisely why we have segmented security into three distinct areas – Network, Endpoint and Security Management. While the Network is essentially the unified gateway, Endpoint refers to the ‘single agent’ access and Management is essentially the common console where the CIO can monitor performance and health of the IT backbone”, explained Gil in in an exclusive interaction with CIOL.

Now, it’s time for software blades

“Enterprises today are demanding a complex aggregation of functions – security that is simple, flexible, extensible and manageable,” said Gil. “These words add up to a lot of functionalities that need to be incorporated into security offerings – ability to add vertically, various components of security, ability to merge the new additions to the centralized console and a lot more.”

In order to make this easier for our customers, Check Point has formulated a concept, which the company calls Software Blades – an architecture where each component of security is a blade, and the entire suite is a collection of blades, each blade containing one security function, and every blade costing almost the same.

Explaining further, he said, “Imagine a scenario where an enterprise has a head office and a few branch offices. The Software Blade architecture allows this enterprise to make a consolidated investment in a Unified Threat management (UTM) solution. While the head office may choose to have the basic security backbones, specific branch offices may have additional VPN, anti-virus and intrusion-prevention tools that now can be procured and managed within the same framework.”

Coming soon – DLP with a difference



Data Leak Prevention (DLP) is not media protection – this is the fundamental philosophy with which Check Point is approaching the concept of DLP for its forthcoming products in 2010.

Gil explained, “Unlike other data leak security providers, we do not believe in locking USB ports with a hardware device that closes all doors, and does not understand that rare need of the customer when he needs to give out that vital information on a pen drive to an external customer.”

He said Check Point has understood that group policies may not always work effectively.

“I personally know an example of a bank, where no bulk e-mailers can be sent to account holders unless the mailing list contains 500 or more entries. What happens when you need to reach out to one disgruntled customer? You change the entire security policy of your IT infrastructure,” he explained.

Check Point’s DLP offering would be a network blade – a software offering which would be available as a software blade for customers to pick and choose along with the other blades, if and when they choose to deploy it.

In the months to come, these software blades themselves would morph into becoming ‘open’ blades that support security offerings from other vendors, and is aimed also at securing the capital expenses that an enterprise has already incurred and making Check Point management console understand and interact with the existing security infrastructure.