Security vendor Blue Coat has modularised the threat-intelligence capabilities it gained in its acquisition of advanced persistent threat (APT) specialist Solera Networks, tackling what a senior executive calls industry “malaise” with new capabilities to be released in functional pieces that can be mixed and matched as necessary.
The first three add-ons, called Blue Coat ThreatBLADES, bowed recently and are targeted at customers finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with the changing pace of malware, Steve Shillingford –previously CEO of Solera and now senior vice president with Blue Coat’s Advanced Threat Protection group – told CSO Australia.
“Enterprises are really looking for a solution that elevates the security, speeds and feeds technical problem to be more about a business risk problem,” he explained. “Customers are becoming less and less included to try and fill functional holes with subject matter experts or complex integration; they really want providers who maintain key pieces of real estate in their network.”
The combined Solera-Blue Coat platform leverages what Blue Coat calls its WebPulse Collaborative Defence Cloud cloud-security platform, which manages millions of crowdsourced malware samples on an ongoing basis based on scans conducted by the 80m customers endpoints currently running the company’s security tools.
Cloud-based security scanning has rapidly emerged as a front-line malware defence for security vendors of all stripes, with centralised malware registries the only way to keep up with the flood of online nasties. And while the Blue Coat software blades emerge into a market that’s increasingly crowded with competition, Shillingford believes the industry is nonetheless ripe for a different approach.
“We’ve seen a bit of malaise in the security industry,” he said. “Customers have gone through the cycle of buying a series of tools that promise the world and deliver very little. But we are pushing at the forefront of solving these really hard problems.”
The new software blades – which include the Blue Coat FileThreat, WebThreat and MalwareAnalysis BLADE – each focus on a different element of the merged companies’ defensive architecture. Additional blades addressing infrastructure threats, anomaly detection, and behavioural based network analysis are expected to follow soon.
“We are giving their customers their cake and allowing them to eat it too,” Shillingford said, “by offering tools that don’t require a lot of integration and touchpoints, so they can get about the business of keeping the network clean and robust.”
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