Organizations are struggling between the challenges of managing a multitude of security tools that are ultimately ineffective or managing risk.  There is a new and emerging appraoch that allows organizations to reduce their IT security budget, increase their capabilities and minimize the burden on their IT staff.  Hear Babak Pasdar, Bat Blue's President and CEO speak on this topic.  Watch this video blog here...

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The Challenge – Ineffective Legacy Approach to Security
Let me first tell you what we already know!  Triple digit drops in the market are becoming common place.  Consumer confidence is at an all-time low and organizations are slowly but surely executing promised layoffs.  How does this translate for the IT organization?

Fewer resources will be available to IT.  Both budgets and staff are being cut while the organization is still burdened with the same responsibilities.  As the IT industry recognizes the convergence of Applications, Networking, Security and Voice, the IT organization has to consistently maintain system health and availability, performance, data integrity and privacy and meet compliance and governance standards.  Along with these there is also another intangible that is still burdensome to the IT organization.  Despite expectation on the part of business for a holding pattern due to economic conditions, IT organizations are still forced to evolve their environment to keep up with certain industry trends.  

All of this drives IT security to try to do more with less, which translates into both overworked staff along with increased risk. 
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As we continue to stumble into a down economy, many CIOs and IT managers have expressed their concerns to me about static or even shrinking IT budgets and resources. They are very specifically concerned about how they can maintain the effectiveness of their security organizations through economic uncertainty. They know the need for compliance, controls, oversight, and audit will persist, however allocation of resources will be an even greater struggle for most. I have gone through several of these conversations and have worked with multiple clients to assist in getting them ahead of the economic curve. This was done by building more effective, efficient and visible security environments that require less management and maintenance resources. We have done this through the use of robust tools and smarter designs that leverage Bat Blue's operational experience. Moreover many of the organizations whose tools I am recommending for your review are at the cusp of their breakthrough as industry stars. These organizations are flexible and anxious for your engagement. Here are some of my recommendations:
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Palo Alto Networks has just released the fall 2008 edition of the Application Usage and Risk Report. This is a completely new set of data from the previous version of the report, and was collected between April 2008 and July 2008 from financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government, retail, and education organizations. The report reveals the application usage behavior of more than 960,000 employees, and supports the notion that employee application usage within the enterprise is akin to the wild west where anything and everything is fair game. Here are some key findings:
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One of IT’s worst nightmares may be coming true: according to a new survey, organizations where more employees are using social networking at work now than six months ago have experienced more security incidents.

Nearly 60 percent of all IT managers surveyed by FaceTime Communications Inc. reported that their users social-network at the office. Of those organizations, the ones where more users were using social networking today than six months ago experienced an average of 39 security incidents a month, requiring 24 hours worth of remediation. Those with about the same or fewer users of social networking at work experienced around 22 or 23 such incidents a month, with about half the remediation time.
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