Tackle cyber threats in real time with the Micro Focus enterprise security platform

In this podcast recorded at RSA Conference 2018, John Delk, Chief Product Officer and the General Manager of the security product group at Micro Focus, talks about how Micro Focus’ solutions comprise an enterprise-grade security platform with built-in scalability and analytics to drive the future of security.

Here’s a transcript of the podcast for your convenience.

Hi, I’m John Delk, I’m the Chief Product Officer and the General Manager of the security product group here at Micro Focus, and this is a Help Net Security podcast focused on the enterprise security platform here at Micro Focus.

I’m really excited to talk to you today about where we’re headed from a perspective of the next-generation security platform, and really our mission as we think about where we’re taking this platform is all about the power of analytics and the capabilities that we have in our portfolio that we’re bringing to bear through the analytics engines, and the representations of analytics use cases that our customers can take advantage of.

At Micro Focus we’re focused on security really from three dimensions. We focus on the securing of users, securing of applications, and securing of data. And in many cases, I’d like to think about those in kind of a three-dimensional chess perspective, because you can’t just play at one level. You know in three-dimensional chess, if you play at one level, your opponent is attacking the other two levels, and that’s very much what we see in the security industry these days. You can’t just focus on securing users without also the applications and the data.

We’ve been working really hard to take industrial-strength technology that served our customers very well for many years, and modernize it through the implementation of microservices containers, API base, all the things that need to be there so that it is fit for purpose in the modern hybrid IT infrastructure dynamic that we live with. We understand that many of our customers are going to have some pieces on-prem, some pieces in the cloud, the variability between that is going to change over time. And so, as we think about our security platform we want to give our customers the ability to move and change as that dynamic between on-prem and cloud changes, and really be leaders in solving hybrid IT use cases from a security perspective.

ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) 7.0

One of the announcements we’re making here at RSA is around ArcSight and the next generation component for that. We’ve announced ESM 7.0, which really is our new architecture around correlation. It allows us to now build a distributed correlation model, which again serves us well. When we think about hybrid use cases, it serves us well. When we think about the level of scalability that customers need to derive as they are building out their next-generation security monitoring centers, and now ArcSight has the ability for you to mix and match from an architecture perspective and really build a path forward that we didn’t have when it was more of a closed architecture previously. And so, you’ll hear more about ESM 7, but it’s an exciting next step for us. It kind of completes the journey in re-architecting that piece of our technology so that we play out this hybrid IT vision, and really will lead us into a whole new set of use cases.

And it builds on pieces we’ve already released, including our data platform and our Investigate platform for hunt. All these things come together now to give our customers much more visibility into the landscape across on-prem and cloud, and a lot more flexibility and how they want to configure and deploy.

ArcSight Investigate

Building on that we’re doing that same sort of thing in several other areas. We have strong plans and we’ll be continuing to announce things across the data security pieces that we deliver, the application security pieces, and a real strong identity core-centric with our Identity and Access Management that serves all of that.

Really the mission then is to see how do we build analytics on top of those. You know as a company, Micro Focus has a strong heritage in the IT operations arena, and we’ve released analytics platforms there based on Vertica – which is an in-line machine learning database that Micro Focus can deliver anomaly detection – and so we have a product to do that against the operations side of the house. We’re now doing that on the security side of the house, and then our opportunity is to bring those two together. As industry we’re all struggling with how do we find those anomalies in more near-real-time, how do we remediate those anomalies, and we think we’re a perfect company to be bringing those things together because of our history that’s a strong heritage on IT operations and security, and then we can marry those with the combination – call SecOps analytics, call it next-generation SIEM, those are the things that we’ll be able to deliver.

We have customers that are already helping us in that direction because some of the use cases that they brought forward are interesting use cases that you marry up what we traditionally think of as security monitoring, and operations monitoring, and get to that next-generation solution. So, we’re excited about the investments that we’re making there.

Another area of analytics is just providing more context-based and risk-based controls. One of the interesting set of offerings that we have is focused in that area around multi-factor authentication and the ability to do that in a step-up way driven by risk factors and a risk engine, and that offers customers again this fit for purpose flexibility as they think about how their users are migrating outside of their four walls, how they’re accessing data from the local coffee shop, or from the airplane, or from third foreign countries, or other third party locations. What level of risk management do they want to take on, what level of access management can they layer on, and we offer an elegant solution for making that happen in a context-based way so that it changes as the user moves. And that’s another power of analytics that we’re injecting into the platform.

So, really our mission if you get right down to it is to put analytics at the center of a security platform that helps our customers secure users, apps, and data; and that in that way play three-dimensional chess and help protect their enterprises in a much more coordinated fashion than they’ve been able to do previously. I would love to invite you to come to our website and get more information about these solutions that I’ve talked about today. You can find that at www.microfocus.com. Thanks for your time.