Many companies claim they provide a complete all-encompassing end-to-end cybersecurity solution – for folks that don’t know, the term suggests a supplier provides all hardware and/or software components and resources to meet the customer’s requirements…in other words, no other supplier need be involved. Just a brief search of “cyber security end-to-end” and you find a number of vendors throwing around the term haphazardly. That ‘no other supplier need be involved’ mindset is nothing but naive. End-to-end is one IT security vendor saying we can solve all the problems you might have. From an enterprise perspective… it’s not very realistic.
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Vormetric has been helping many of the world’s largest and most reputable organizations secure sensitive information assets. And don’t worry – if you think I am writing an entire blog about how great Vormetric is, the next bit may surprise you. As much as we love bringing great solutions to market, we fully recognize that we are not the only player in town. We’ll be the first to say that there are other technologies, other players and other needs. Yes, that’s right – the Vormetric combo covers a lot…and I mean, a lot – but it’s not everything.
It is so important for us to build a collaborative ecosystem so we can provide the best solutions for our customers. Whether it be for a big data or cloud environment, we need to bring solutions to market that solve specific problems. At the end of the day, all that matters is that information is secure. If you are working with a cloud vendor as an example, our goal is to provide organizations with deployment options which might also include native encryption solutions from the cloud provider. We don’t have to be the complete end-to-end solution and are happy to provide additional value where it makes sense.
Additionally, there may be target markets for specific verticals or geographic regions. It could be education, healthcare. Or think regionally – there could be a country specific need that comes into play that Vormetric may decide not to focus on. A technology partner in that region may be successful because they understand the local needs of the market. And even if we are not building solutions for that specific market, we are more than happy to work with partners in order to provide the most comprehensive solutions.
You may have heard us talking about reducing TCO – dealing with too many vendors can be problematic and costly. It’s fair to say that moving to a single overall security vendor is unrealistic. But the goal of reducing the number of security vendors from 20 to less than 5 may be the best path forward. This way, you are reducing overall cost while leveraging the scale of multiple solutions.
We also work closely with SIEM vendors providing rich information so that they can correlate data – not just from Vormetric products, but also other products. That is a great example of interoperability in the enterprise ecosystem. The more intelligent analysis you can do, the faster and better equipped organizations will be to either detect or prevent breaches from happening.
We understand that customers will choose from a range of different offerings. If you look at our customers, they push us to work across a large partner ecosystem so that when a customer deploys technology (whether it’s cloud or big data or storage), we are providing the best experience for the end user. We don’t want a situation where something goes wrong and two different vendors – or worse yet, more than two vendors – point fingers at each other. Our mission is instead to reduce the likelihood of something going wrong and if something does come up we are working together, not wasting time playing the blame game.
This notion of having more solutions that work well together is a theme we should all work towards. The reality is that end-to-end, as we know it, should be a collaboration across a wide range of technology partners.