Realizing Rapid Value from Identity Management Provisioning

We’ve been working with most of the leading Identity Management/Provisioning tools since 2003. Most of the products have been acquired or rolled up into a larger suite of products. This process brought maturity, stability, and added investment to the industry. This helped the products and industry establish a place in the IT infrastructure that’s here to stay.

When we first meet with a prospective client we always ask the question, “What’s driving your need for provisioning?” Most organizations will talk first about audit compliance forcing these initiatives. And although this driver has finally elevated the effort to become a budget priority, the fact is that most companies wanted to do the project years ago simply to improve the overall security of the organization. And that can still be done pretty quickly.

So what if you’re one of those organizations that still can’t seem justify the project? Let me suggest you consider a streamlined, rapid approach that will enable you to realize value quickly — I mean in a matter of weeks vs. months or years! Read more

Log Management the Easy Way!

The Need for Effective Log Management

Log Management is a necessity for regulatory compliance and essential to maintaining a positive security posture in your environment. As your IT organization evolves to comply with today’s regulations and defend against new network security threats, you should choose a solution that avoids expensive maintenance and operating costs, reduces the number of resources needed to maintain and support your solution, and most importantly provides the most effective log management solution on the market today.

Our SaaS offering collects log data via an agentless collection device and provides log storage, reporting, correlation and monitoring leveraging our grid computing and storage architecture in our highly secure redundant datacenters. Read more

Cyber attacks, they occur more often than you think!

Cyber attacks have become a ‘weapon of choice’ for many terrorist organizations. Cyber attacks can be launched from anywhere in the world that has Internet access, are often untraceable, and have the potential to wreak havoc on our financial and economic systems, defense networks, transportation systems, power infrastructure, and many other essential capabilities.

Although not widely publicized, cyber attacks occur routinely. Within the State of Texas, a major computer security incident with significant financial and operational impact is an annual event for most organizations, including state government entities. In fact, state entities reported a daily average of almost 575 security incidents in fiscal year 2009, including malicious code execution, unauthorized access to data, and service disruptions. Most of these attacks are blocked, prevented, or result in only minor disruptions.

Between January 2005 and August 2009, Texas-based organizations reported 105 incidents involving privacy data; 43 of these incidents were government-related (universities, cities and counties, and state agencies). These 105 incidents exposed over 3 million records, with the cost estimated at an all-time high of $202 per record exposed, totaling $606 million dollars to recover from the attacks. This is why it is imperative for organizations to have a “multi-layered” approach to security to ensure these attacks remain unsuccessful or only do minimal damage and disruption.

Why is it even more important to have an IR plan than a DR plan?

Virtually every organization has a DR (disaster recovery) plan in place as they should. However, most organizations don’t have a detailed IR (incident response) plan in place for when their IT systems are impacted by malicious behavior from either external or internal causes.

Why is it potentially more important to have an IR plan in place vs. a DR plan? The answer is simple, statistics. According to several creditable sources, the percentage of companies in the United States who experienced an IT incident in 2009 related to a directed malicious attack from either an external source (malware, etc.) or internal source (privileged user, disgruntled employee) was 49% compared to less than 10% of organizations who actually activated and used their DR plan.

Over the last few years we, at PathMaker Group, have seen the number of incidents, and the impact from those incidents, dramatically increase in number and impact (both downtime and financial). Suprisingly, most organizations still don’t have a defined Incident Response team and procedures to address these issues in a timely fashion to reduce downtime and financial impact. Read more

We have the coolest security technology partners!

Recent press supports our direction on selecting leading edge security technology partners. Not long ago, NetWitness found the most invasive Netbot in recent history.

Now our cloud-based monitoring solution partner, Alert Logic, discovered a serious bug with Facebook.

IDG reported “Facebook is fixing a Web programming bug that could have allowed hackers to alter profile pages or make restricted information public.

The flaw was discovered last week and reported to Facebook by M.J. Keith, a senior security analyst with security firm Alert Logic. Read more