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I get a daily email news from searchsecurity.com according to my interests in risk assessment and risk migitation. It's fairly tolerable and sometimes I even click on the message before trashing although the content doesn't always get high marks for quality. |
The other day I got an email promoting a Webcast sponsored by Arc Sight titled "New Webcast: Effectively Mitigate Security Risks and Manage Threats". I thought - WOW - that sounds a lot like our messaging at PTA Technologies. The speakers were Brian T. Contos, CSO and Dave Anderson, Senior Manager, Product Marketing. Some of the messages were "Discover how to balance risk optimization and performance". (PTA provides a quantitative risk analysis framework and the ability to produce a prioritized, risk optimization plan - sounds familiar?)
Arcsight position the company as a provider of security and compliance management solutions that intelligently identify and mitigate business risk by providing a real time and historic view into external attacks, insider threats and compliance breaches.
Arcsight has a great customer base and large reseller partner channel, but from the wording in the email it was hard for me to know exactly what they do - so I called on a customer of ours who uses Arc Sight for a commentary. Sans marketing collateral - its a product for firewall/IPS log analysis. The CISO at our customer told me that it's difficult to use and the reports he gets are not very helpful to his everyday needs in mitigating trusted insider threats. This customer uses a real-time extrusion detection system and he firmly believes that real-time alerts on violations in the data, network and people planes are far more useful than historical log analysis. As he put it " we have a gigabit network, every second - 100mega byte of data is flowing or 8.5 terabyte a day - how can we possibly use log analysis for real-time audit and detection of attacks? "
I then took a look at folks who took the free download of PTA Professional. Lo and behold - our colleagues at Arcsight are frequent fliers and Mr Brian T. Contos CSO is a registered PTA user.
It's an honor for a small, boot-strapped operation like ourselves to be an inspiration for an award-winning company (Gartner MQ, Forrester) company like Arc sight.
