Welcome Guest. | Log In | Register | Membership Benefits

Don't Be Fooled By Buzzwords, Flash, And Empty Promises

Heading to San Francisco for RSA, BSides and AGC? Make sure you know how to navigate the vendor gauntlet

Feb 24, 2012 | 09:58 AM | 

By Andrew Hay
Dark Reading
Click here for more articles.

Next week is going to be a busy one in San Francisco. Three conferences, America’s Growth Capital’s 2012 event, Security BSides San Francisco, and the RSA Security Conference are all next week and there will certainly be no shortage of security monitoring vendors clamoring to entice you with their technological cures for what ails your organization’s pain.

Unfortunately, there will be a handful of buzzwords to wade through and you need to be prepared to ask the right questions to understand their actual meaning. Here are some of the words to look out for while walking around the events, talking to vendors, or sitting through a presentation:

1) Next-Generation – what makes the product a "next generation" solution? Ask the vendor to clarify the product’s evolution from its previous generational state in addition to the iterative steps taken to get there (a.k.a the roadmap). Also, if the product is positioned as next-generation based on its superiority over a competing solution, make the vendor prove it. Ask for some customer references that have evaluated both solutions (without the vendor on the phone) and see if the customer can explain what makes vendor "A" more next-generation than vendor "B."

2) Big Data – has the vendor simply slapped the term "big data" onto marketing materials because their product can consume, correlate, and present lots of data? Ask the vendor how their product compares to an analytics platform that leverages big data technologies/capabilities that have been vetted by organizations with REAL big data problems. If they try to tell you that Hadoop-based or similar analytics platforms aren’t scalable, couldn’t possibly do the same job or that their flat file format works better, ask them to prove it with statistical and comparative evidence.

3) Intelligent – what makes it intelligent? Can it stop attackers, do your taxes, and make waffles? What makes this release more intelligent than previous versions? Is it simply that the product now integrates with five more third-party products than it did this time last year? Are you now able to compare the offending IP address or host to a public blacklist? Is the workflow that makes it intelligent? "Intelligent" is one of those terms that marketing people likely thought sounded less pretentious than "next-generation," but still conveyed how much better.

The ultimate question that you must ask all security monitoring vendors at conferences like these is “what makes your product more intelligent/advanced/capable than ‘xyz company’s’ product?” If the representative can’t explain it to you without drawing on buzzwords and non-committal fluff, ask for a follow-up conversation with a technical resource, ideally the CTO or lead architect, when you return to the office. If you notice the person on booth-duty leaning into a pitch, don’t be afraid to stop them and challenge what they’re saying with some questions of your own. After all, you’re there to learn about the product/service on your terms, not theirs.

P.S. For additional points, ask the person you are talking with to explain what exactly their product does in 15 words or less (something that will likely be more fun for you than for the vendor trying to explain).

Andrew Hay is senior analyst with 451 Research's Enterprise Security Practice (ESP) and is an author of three network security books. Follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/andrewsmhay



Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dark Reading encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dark Reading moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. Dark Reading further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
Subscribe to RSS



Security Monitoring Reports

report Fundamentals of User Activity Monitoring
Benchmarking normal activity and then monitoring for users who stray from that norm is an essential strategy for getting ahead of potential data and system breaches. But choosing the right tools is only part of the effort. Without sufficient training, efficient deployment and a good response plan, attackers could gain the upper hand.

report Does SIEM Make Sense For Your Company?
A security information and event management system serves as a repository for all the security alerts and logging systems from a firm's devices. But this can be overkill for a company that is understaffed or has overestimated its security information needs. In this report, we discuss 10 questions to ask yourself in determining whether SIEM makes sense for you--and how to pick the right system if it does.

report Monitoring Tools and Logs Make All The Difference
It's no longer a matter of "if" you get hacked, but when. In this special report, we take a look at ways to measure your security posture and the challenges that lie ahead with the emerging threat landscape.

Other reports from the Security Monitoring Tech Center:

Related Content

Security Management 2.0: Time to Replace Your SIEM?
Is it time? Are you waving the white flag? Has your first gen SIEM failed to meet expectations despite your investment? If you are questioning whether your existing product or service can get the job done, you are not alone. Read this Securosis white paper to learn how easy it can be to replace your SIEM with a next generation solution.

IT Executive Guide to Security Intelligence: Transitioning from SIEM to Total Security Intelligence
Read this whitepaper to learn how adopting a next generation SIEM solution provides security intelligence, to allow organizations to maintain comprehensive and cost-effective information security. Discover how security intelligence enables critical concerns in five key areas: Data silo consolidation, threat detection, fraud discovery, risk assessment/risk management, and regulatory compliance.

The Return on Security of QRadar: Improving Operational Efficiencies in Federal Government
In this study, IANS interviewed two Q1 Labs customers using QRadar to assess their Return On Security (ROS). The two customers were providers of service to the U.S. Government and had highly secure environments dealing with extremely sensitive data. The data yielded from the interviews showed substantial benefit to the organizations for the cost, both in money and staff time.

SANS What Works Webcast: Worldwide Retailer Boosts Privacy with Security Intelligence
A leading retailer with stores worldwide was seeking a more innovative tool to protect customer privacy and intellectual property. PCI compliance mandated log collection, but a vast number of different tools generated an overwhelming amount of log data, making it difficult for the small security team to review it effectively. The solution the company chose had to fit into a diverse network, provide intelligent reporting and offer a centralized management console.

Learn How Security Intelligence Can Help Combat WikiLeaks Stuxnet and Advanced Threats
WikiLeaks and Stuxnet have illustrated a few fundamental IT security issues that have underscored the need for Total Security Intelligence to counter advanced threats and to detect anomalous behavior. See how government and commercial organizations are using QRadar as an integral component of their IT security program to identify emerging threats based on context and situational awareness.




Featured Webcasts
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports