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We caught up with Bitdefender’s regional sales director for UK and Ireland, Jamie Pearce, at this year’s InfoSec Europe to find out how business security is evolving, what causes headaches for IT managers, and how to tackle the 400,000 new malware variants that are discovered every single day.
What new products and services are you focusing on at the moment?
We’ve just launched a new release of our enterprise software. Bitdefender has been around for almost a decade now, and we always focused on end-point malware protection. In those early days it was about protecting physical servers and desktops. About five years ago we started to see the need to protect virtual environments. You have to take a different approach to protect a virtual environment. So we designed a solution that was specifically optimised for virtual environments. That was called GravityZone.
We’ve just launched the next generation of the product. We now have one application that has one single console that will now protect and manage your additional physical end-points, virtual infrastructure, any hypervisor (vmware, citrix, etc.) and also mobile devices, which can be Android or iOS.
We call it an adaptive agent, so depending on the operating system of the end-point, it will install itself optimised for that environment.
How has business security changed over the past few years?
The main thing is the challenge of management. The network that all devices we use are connected to is no longer just a static, physical network. The parameters of the network disappeared many years ago.
With people using their own devices to connect to corporate services, you no longer have that immediate physical control of that device, which may not even be owned by the company.
The question is how do you protect a diverse set of products, while keeping it simple? The challenge now is about management. And the security risk is as great as ever. Now there are nearly 400,000 new variants of malware found every single day. The problem is not going away. The problem is how can you manage it and provide the right level of protection, irrespective of where the end-point is.
How is remote working and BYOD affecting business security?
There are real business benefits to enabling workers to operate remotely and still be productive wherever they are. But equally, they can cause a headache for IT managers – keeping track of what devices and apps should be used and are being used by employees.
The real challenge is to try and make it simple, to still provide a high level of protection but in a way that they can simply deploy and manage what’s going on.
How will the workplace evolve and how will security adapt?
We all work remotely, so our office is wherever we are. The devices and apps we use are what’s important. I think we’ll start to see people using wearables more, so if you’re at a show or something you can still respond to texts and emails and be aware of what’s going on in real time.
So what Bitdefender does is think about how we can let people do that without them putting their business at risk.
We already have an app for Android smartwatches, so we’re ready to protect wearables. The two things drive each other: the need for access to information anywhere and keeping the corporate infrastructure safe.
Check out our analysis on InfoSec Europe 2015 here.
