Rational Survivability

Nope.  Haven’t changed my mind.  Sorry.  Harrington stirred it up and Chuvakin reminded me of it.

OK, so way back in April, on the cusp of one of my normal rages against the (security) machine, I blogged how Data Leakage Protection (DLP) is doomed to be a feature and not a market. 

I said the same thing about NAC, too.  Makin’ friends and influencin’ people.  That’s me!

Oh my how the emails flew from the VP’s of Marketing & Sales from the various "Flying V’s" (see below)  Good times, good times.

Here’s snippets of what I said:

Besides having the single largest collection of vendors that begin with
the letter ‘V" in one segment of the security space (Vontu, Vericept,
Verdasys, Vormetric…what the hell!?) it’s interesting to see how
quickly content monitoring and protection functionality is approaching
the inflection point of market versus feature definition.

The "evolution" of the security market marches on.

Known by many names, what I describe as content monitoring and
protection (CMP) is also known as extrusion prevention, data leakage or
intellectual property management toolsets.  I think for most, the
anchor concept of digital rights management (DRM) within the Enterprise
becomes glue that makes CMP attractive and compelling; knowing what and
where your data is and how its distribution needs to be controlled is
critical.

The difficulty with this technology is the just like any other
feature, it needs a delivery mechanism.  Usually this means yet another
appliance; one that’s positioned either as close to the data as
possible or right back at the perimeter in order to profile and control
data based upon policy before it leaves the "inside" and goes "outside."

I made the point previously that I see this capability becoming a
feature in a greater amalgam of functionality;  I see it becoming table
stakes included in application delivery controllers, FW/IDP systems and
the inevitable smoosh of WAF/XML/Database security gateways (which I
think will also further combine with ADC’s.)

I see CMP becoming part of UTM suites.  Soon.

That being said, the deeper we go to inspect content in order to
make decisions in context, the more demanding the requirements for the
applications and "appliances" that perform this functionality become.
Making line speed decisions on content, in context, is going to be
difficult to solve. 

CMP vendors are making a push seeing this writing on the wall, but
it’s sort of like IPS or FW or URL Filtering…it’s going to smoosh.

Websense acquired PortAuthority.  McAfee acquired Onigma.  Cisco will buy…

I Never Metadata I Didn’t Like…

I didn’t even bother to go into the difficulty and differences in classifying, administering, controlling and auditing structured versus unstructured data, nor did I highlight the differences between those solutions on the market who seek to protect and manage information from leaking "out" (the classic perimeter model) versus management of all content ubiquitously regardless of source or destination.  Oh, then there’s the whole encryption in motion, flight and rest thing…and metadata, can’t forget that…

Yet I digress…let’s get back to industry dynamics.  It seems that Uncle Art is bound and determined to make good on his statement that in three years there will be no stand-alone security companies left.  At this rate, he’s going to buy them all himself!

As we no doubt already know, EMC acquired Tablus. Forrester seems to think this is the beginning of the end of DLP as we know it.  I’m not sure I’d attach *that* much gloom and doom to this specific singular transaction, but it certainly makes my point:

  August 20, 2007

EMC/RSA Drafts Tablus For Deeper Data-Centric Security
The Beginning Of The End Of The Standalone ILP Market
by
Thomas Raschke

with
Jonathan Penn, Bill Nagel, Caroline Hoekendijk

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

EMC expects Tablus to play a key role in its information-centric security and storage lineup. Tablus’ balanced information leak prevention (ILP) offering will benefit both sides of the EMC/RSA house, boosting the latter’s run at the title of information and risk market leader. Tablus’ data classification capabilities will broaden EMC’s Infoscape beyond understanding unstructured data at rest; its structured approach to data detection and protection will provide a data-centric framework that will benefit RSA’s security offerings like encryption and key management. While holding a lot of potential, this latest acquisition by one of the industry’s heavyweights will require comprehensive integration efforts at both the technology and strategic level. It will also increase the pressure on other large security and systems management vendors to address their organization’s information risk management pain points. More importantly, it will be remembered as the turning point that led to the demise of the standalone ILP market as we know it today.

So Mogull will probably (still) disagree, as will the VP’s of Marketing/Sales working for the Flying-V’s who will no doubt barrage me with email again, but it’s inevitable.  Besides, when an analyst firm agrees with you, you can’t be wrong, right Rich!?

/Hoff