Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Is the security market ready for preemptive monitoring solutions?

How many times have you seen firewalls failing because of a subtile issue that becomes critical in time? Memory leaks, license or contract expiration, disk space running low, excessive local logging, sudden cluster failover without any obvious reason, performance issues masked by imperfect monitoring and many other things one could detect in time with a right tool.

This list could be a couple of page long only for Check Point.

Now, let's say our security and networking systems are multi-layer and multi-vendor. How to make sure your system is running fine? How to see the early tiny signs of future problems to fix them before they become critical? What do you do?

SmartView Monitor? Scripts? How often, how deep? How much effort do you spend to tune such a system?  Any?

During my 15 years I have seen just too many issues where security system failure could be prevented by early detection of the symptoms.

Some integrators and Check Point support partners even sell such monitoring as a service. Usually it is done manually, remotely or on site, on a periodic basis: a week, a month, couple of times during the year. Each of such services is an artistic piece, where experts are looking for something they know and suspect. Each one of them for something different, as their experiences are not coherent and comprehensive.

There are many niche vendors to complement well known security solutions with change management and orchestration: Tufin, Algosec, Skybox Security, Firemon, Athena and others. With so many companies there is clearly a market for such tools.

But what about preemptive monitoring? The only company I know for such matter is Indeni.

Indeni is not just for Check Point. Their product is working also with Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and F5.

The tool monitors thousands of details that might indicate a failure and reports the findings as alerts. It can be deployed and integrated in half an hour. It is intuitive and simple to use.

You do not have to take my work for it. Register, download a demo and check for yourself. Or just sign up for the news from Indeni.

In my personal view, having just one vendor does not necessarily mean there is no market. On the opposite. It may mean this particular solution is going to be the next big thing.




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