Blue Coat steps-up ways to contain Advanced Threats

Venkat Raghavan,
Senior Vice President, Corporate Development,
Blue Coat

Venkat Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Blue Coat shares with VARINDIA the various aspects of Advanced Threat Protection and how Blue Coat looks at it as a Security vendor

For the last 15 years customers have built up security capabilities to protect and block critical threats. But customers now are getting into a situation of advanced threats that are highly complex and sophisticated. Advanced Threats are serious threats that evade all thetraditional defense systems that previously were used to get rid of less complex threats. Customers now are exposed to environments where advanced threats are already present. Accordingly mindset has to change to reflect the new threat landscape that has become all the more critical. 

“We at Blue Coat are recognizing the fact that things have changed; most companies are going to be impacted by these threats and are prepared to put their employees and strategiesto counter these advanced threats in a more comprehensive way,” puts in Venkat Raghavan, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Blue Coat.

Advanced Threat Protection vs Traditional Defence System

There are 2 kind of threats – known and unknown. The known threats can be blocked for which there are different tools like intrusion detection, Firewall.But it is not so with the unknown threats. “We remain increasingly more interconnected through different devices nowadays. Our IP addresses are connected; mobility devices are on a rise along with mobile apps; there are things put up on the cloud.  In a way, there is a whole new paradigm shift in terms of how we want to remain connectedand use these apps and systems,” explains Venkat.

There is a combination of highly empowered users using the most sophisticated apps bypassing IT in many cases. “We are seeing everything being connected over internet and we seeing the attacks getting increased dramatically. They are breaching traditional defense system, which is why we call them Advanced Threat. Mindset has changed from merely able to block a threat.So in the next 10 years we are going to put a strategy in place that willhelp the user quickly recognize that he is being breached and then accordingly put in place a remediation or a containment strategy and learn how to improve the fundamental security policies,” Venkat maintains.

However, challenge for IT is how this is can be contained and in many cases because of rich experiences of applications, their usecannot be stopped. But it can be ensured that there is a balance in the demand of these apps. “We call this category Business Assurance technology in which Blue Coat is a leader. We want to provide an assurance so that users using these apps and new devices can strike a balance and still ensure them to be productive in their activities,” ensures Venkat.

The future is into the Cloud and the mobile environment. There is essentially a future foreseen where millions of mobile apps are being used and are then moved to the Cloud.“This is happening.We are seeing the trend to continue. If we look at the micro trends, we see a high degree of connectivity where everything will be connected to the Internet and we will see a huge uptake of mobile apps, mobile platform and devices and a good amount of apps going to the Cloud. These are highly advanced apps that come along additional capabilities, which also call for risks. Advanced threat protection is going to be compounded and threats exasperated; the very definition of mobile app is changing,” says Venkat.

Going ahead…

Blue Coat is looking at educating customers on the business assurance technology. “This is a problem that will last another 10 years from now. We are making sure customers understand they need more advancedthreat lifecycledefense. That’s the main focus. We can recognize the known threats and most importantly we are geared at looking at these threats - do they represent any malicious behaviour, can we isolate them, can we contain them?Ultimately if there is a threat or an attack, we can quickly contain it and use our Global threat intelligence network to enable additional security capabilities to our customers,” he sums up. 

Blue Coat sees a huge opportunity in this space.A lot of government customers, Public sector customers, BFSI are taking it seriously.Advanced Threat is a problem across the globe,but it is gaining popularity because of the bigger issue that we are living in a highly interconnected world. 

samrita@varindia.com