Q&A: Nick Lowe, Check Point head of northern Europe

Nick Lowe: Vendors need to be more collaborative

V3.co.uk sat down with Nick Lowe to discuss the need for consolidation in the security space, and the effects of the recession.

V3.co.uk: What are your customers most worried about in these current times?
Nick Lowe: There are probably three main things I'm hearing on a regular basis. The first relates to what a security infrastructure will look like going forward. This gets exaggerated the more senior you go in an organisation. Cloud computing, the protection of data, access controls - these are all concerns. They're looking at whether cloud computing will save them money, and what the security implications are. Another thing people are saying is that their day-to-day environments are consolidating thanks to virtualisation, but there is a lot of debate about just how to secure these virtual systems. Finally, budgets seem to be escalating but it's not sustainable. They are suggesting that the consolidation of security and management products needs to accelerate if they are to gain control of this complexity.

So the recession doesn't seem to have affected budgets?
I'm not suggesting that security is bucking the economic trend, but it takes a very brave chief information officer to turn down a well-thought-out, good-business-case security requirement. With the escalation of these budgets, the business is becoming more interested in those decisions, and decisions are going much further up the organisation. We're certainly seeing more demand for our products than last year, so security spending doesn't seem to be as affected.

On the issue of increasing complexity, is this not the vendor's fault?
Yes, the blame has to be placed squarely at the application providers. Ten years ago you'd put anti-virus in and a firewall around where your business touched the web, and you'd be fairly confident that your business would be robust. But now the average company has tens of different devices to manage, and in large companies this can run into the hundreds, and probably 14 different types of technologies and vendors to support. All of a sudden you have a monolithic, creaking architecture. Vendors have to help by consolidating their technologies, and being able to define policies which reflect a company's compliance and risk needs so they can deploy seamlessly.

Is this actually happening?
Yes, we're being asked to combine firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, and they seem to be coming together rapidly. We've also worked hard to produce management systems which allow customers to manage virtual private networks, Secure Sockets Layer, firewall policies and so on. Customers can save significant amounts not just by consolidating the number of vendors they choose, but operationally in training costs to operate these products.

How about beyond intra-vendor consolidation? Is the industry ever likely to co-operate to make industry-wide standards possible?
Well, we publish our application programming interfaces for other security vendors. We have several hundred companies working with us in our community. Vendors need to be more collaborative, and we are encouraging this by allowing third parties to integrate their own niche technologies into our own. It's a direction I think we'll see more of, but whether the vendors can agree on standards and adhere to them I don't know. The security threat landscape is moving faster than agreement can probably be reached by committee.

What are the major security threats facing your customers these days?
There appear to be fewer well orchestrated direct attacks at firewalls. Propagation techniques are also changing. Drive-by attacks on the web are becoming common - basically anything that allows hackers to get an executable on your device. So organisations are spending a lot of money on firewalls and perimeter security and trying to educate users not to do stupid things, and then one goes to a legitimate site that has been infected and bam, you've got a big problem.