The Magic of Symbiotic Security: Creating an Ecosystem of Security Systems

Throw out everything that you know about security tools today. No more six-figure appliances that only do one thing marginally well. No more proprietary protocols. We deserve better and we demand better. Envision a world where your security tools talk with eachother. They communicate and share data in order to leverage eachothers strengths and and help compensate for their weaknesses. They work together to solve problems. Envision "Symbiotic Security". Symbiotic Security is a new term that was coined to describe the ability of a tool to consume data from other tools or provide data to other tools. As part of our research, we have examined various classes of tools on the market and identified these abilities in each of them resulting in a label of "Consumer", "Provider", or "Symbiotic". As a consumer of security tools, this completely revolutionizes the way that we make purchases. As an example, let's pretend that you are purchasing a new Intrusion Prevention System for your enterprise. As you begin to evaluate the various tools from the Gartner Magic Quadrant, you quickly realize that they almost all have the same primary feature set. The key differentiator at this point aren't the rules or the hardware, but rather, the ability for the system to send and receive data with other systems. The IPS itself has some signatures and blocking abilities, but has zero relevancy data. Now, we give the IPS the ability to pull in vulnerability data and system configuration information from network and host scans and we gain relevancy. Add in some additional data on where the potential threat is coming from and now you have the data necessary to take a decisive action on threats. This new system is a "Consumer". Now, if you give the IPS the ability to send information to other devices on things like the source of relevant threats, those devices, like a firewall or HIPS, can now make intelligent blocking decisions as well. Our IPS now has "Provider" abilities. Since our IPS is