Have you ever been in a vendor meeting and heard the vendor extol the greatness of their threat intelligence?  You may have even seen a slide that looks similar to this:

Image source: iStockphoto

The vendor probably proceeded to highlight the key differentiators that make their threat intelligence network stand second to none.  Bullets containing statistics like this surely followed:

• Global coverage, in well over 100 countries
• 50 million network devices
• 50 billion web queries each month
• 30 billion emails a month
• 100 million users

For many years, security professionals have lived by the three pillars of risk management – AVOID, TREAT, ACCEPT.  These great tenets have served the profession well, enabling CISOs to build appropriately secure networks at a tolerable level of cost. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the litany of security breaches we have seen over the past 12 months, it’s clear that the landscape is changing.  More than ever before, security is clearly a ‘no-win’ game.

The high profile attackers, state-sponsored or otherwise, are one threat – but it goes deeper than this.  The keys to the kingdom are no longer in the hands of the generals and policy makers; their decisions and discussions are enabled by email, IM and IP telephony, all of which sit firmly in the domain of the IT department and system admin – and stressed, poorly paid employees do not make the ideal custodians of such critical information. As an example, Anonymous claims to have access to every classified government database in the US, but they didn’t hack them – disaffected system administrators and employees simply opened the doors for them, or sent them the access codes. 

As the broadening gap between our ambitions for a secure enterprise and our abilities to deliver on such a vision become self-evident, the time has come to pay equal attention to the poor cousin of risk management, “TRANSFER.”  For many CISOs, risk transference is a topic that is largely theoretical as, even when a task is outsourced, the risk associated with a breach commonly remains with the data owning organisation. Cyber insurance offers a different solution.

Last week saw news that yet another top GRC software vendor has been acquired, following in the footsteps of Paisley, Archer, OpenPages, among others. BWise has always been an impressive vendor in the GRC space, so first off I think congratulations are in order for both parties.

That said, if you didn’t foresee NASDAQ getting into the GRC software space coming, don’t beat yourself up… after seeing the large technology vendors and content providers enter the space over the past 3 years, this wasn’t an obvious move. But looking a little deeper, NASDAQ’s move makes sense for a couple reasons:

-          NASDAQ’s target market cares about GRC. NASDAQ lists its target roles as marketing/corporate communications, board and corporate secretary, investor relations, and corporate finance. All of these roles have a vested interest in better controls, stronger risk management practices, and improved corporate governance.

-          BWise has always focused on the “G” of GRC. More than any other of the top GRC software vendors, BWise targeted governance professionals with capabilities such as entity management.

-          There are immediate integration possibilities. Among NASDAQ’s corporate solutions are products for board management, whistleblower reporting, and XBRL filing. BWise has a host of capabilities (issue management, process management, policy management, reporting, etc.) that could quickly add value to implementations of those products.

But, as always with a deal like this, both parties will have to show the market how they will address some key questions:

During the past three years, you may have noticed that security and risk professionals have added a new term to their lexicon – business resiliency. Is this just an attempt by vendors to rebrand business continuity (BC) and IT disaster recovery (DR) in much the same way that vendors rebranded information security as cybersecurity to make it seem sexier and to sell more of their existing products? Some of it certainly is rebranding. However, like the shift in the threat landscape from lone hackers to well-funded crime syndicates and state sponsored agents that precipitated the use of the term cybersecurity, a real shift has also taken place in BC/DR.

If you look up the term “resiliency” in the dictionary, it’s defined as “an occurrence of rebounding or springing back”. Thus, business resiliency refers to the ability of a business to spring back from a disruption to its operations. Historically, BC/DR focused on the ability of the business to recover from a disruption. Recovery implies that there was in fact a disruption, that for some period of time, business operations were unavailable, there was downtime as the business strove to recover. Resiliency, on the other hand, implies that an event may have affected the business’ operations, perhaps the business operated in a diminished state for some period of time, but operations were never completely unavailable, the business was never down.