Women in business leadership -- networking their way to success

The next BriefingsDirect digital business insights panel discussion focuses on the evolving role of women in business leadership. We’ll explore how pervasive business networks are impacting relationships and changes in business leadership requirements and opportunities for women.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

To learn more about the transformation of talent management strategies as a result of digital business and innovation, please join me in welcoming our guests, Alicia Tillman, Chief Marketing Officer at SAP Ariba, and Lisa Skeete Tatum, Co-founder and CEO of Landit in New York. The panel was recorded in association with the recent 2017 SAP Ariba LIVE conference in Las Vegas, and is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Alicia, looking at a confluence of trends, we have the rise of business networks and we have an advancing number of women in business leadership roles. Do they have anything to do with one another? What's the relationship?

Tillman

Tillman: It is certainly safe to say that there is a relationship between the two. Networks historically connected businesses mostly from a transactional standpoint. But networks today are so much more about connecting people. And not only connecting them in a business context, but also from a relationship-standpoint as well.

There is as much networking and influence that happens in a digital network as  does from meeting somebody at an event, conference or forum. It has really taken off in the recent years as being a way to connect quickly and broadly -- across geographies and industries. There is nothing that brings you speed like a network, and that’s why I think there is such a strong correlation to how digital networking has taken off -- and what a true technical network platform can allow.

Gardner: When people first hear “business networks,” they might think about transactions and applications talking to applications. But, as you say, this has become much broader in the last few years; business networks are really about social interactions, collaboration, and even joining companies culturally.

How has that been going? Has this been something that’s been powerful and beneficial to companies?

Tillman: It’s incredibly powerful and beneficial. If you think about how buying habits are these days, buyers are very particular about the goods that they are interested in, and, frankly, the people that they source from.

Skeete Tatum

If I look at my buying population in particular at SAP Ariba, there is a tremendous movement toward sustainable goal or fair-trade types of responsibilities, of wanting to source goods from minority-owned businesses, wanting to source only organic or fair-trade products, wanting to only partner with organizations where they know within their supply chain the distribution of their product is coming from locations in the world where the working conditions are safe and their employees are being paid fairly.

A network allows for that; the SAP Ariba Network certainly allows for that, as we can match suppliers directly with what those incredibly diverse buyer needs are in today’s environment.

Gardner: Lisa, we just heard from Alicia about how it's more important that companies have a relationship with one another and that they actually look for culture and character in new ways. Tell us about Landit, and how you're viewing this idea of business networks changing the way people relate to their companies and even each other?

Skeete Tatum: Our goal at Landit is to democratize career success for women around the globe. We have created a technology platform that not only increases the success and engagement of women in the workplace, but it also enables companies in this new environment to attract, develop, and retain high-potential diverse talent.

Our goal at Landit is to democratize career success for women around the globe.

We do that by providing each woman with the personalized playbook in the spirit of one-size-fits-one. That empowers them with the access to the tools, the resources, the know-how, and, yes, the human connections that they need to more successfully navigate their paths.

It’s really in response to the millions of women who will find themselves at an inflection point; whether they are in a company that they love but are just trying to figure out how to more successfully navigate there, or they may be feeling a little stuck and are not sure how to get out. The challenge is: “I am motivated, I have the skills, I just don’t know where to start.”

We have really focused on knitting what we believe are those key elements together -- leveraged by technology that actually guides them. But we find that companies in this new environment are often overwhelmed and trying to figure out a way to manage this new diverse workforce in this era of connectedness. So we give them a turnkey, one-size-fits-one solution, too.

As Alicia mentioned, in this next stage of collaborative businesses, there are really two things. One, we are more networked and more visible than ever before, which is great, because it’s created more opportunities and flexibility than we have seen -- not to mention more access. However, those opportunities are highly dependent on how someone showcases their value, their contribution, and their credibility, which makes it even more important to cultivate not only your brand and your network. It goes beyond just individual capabilities of getting at what is the sponsorship in the support of a strong network.

The second thing I would say, that Alicia also mentioned, is that today’s business environment -- which is more global, more diverse in its tapestry -- requires businesses to create an environment where everyone feels valued. People need to feel like they can bring the full measure of their talent and passion to the workplace. Companies want amazing talent to find a place at their company.

Gardner: If I’m at a company looking to be more diverse, how would I use Landit to accomplish that? Also, if I were an individual looking to get into the type of company that I want to be involved with, how would I use Landit?

Connecting supply and demand for talent

Skeete Tatum: As an individual, when you come on to Landit, we actually give you one of the key ingredients for success. Because we often don’t know what we don’t know, we knit together the first step, of “Where do I fit?” If you are not in a place that fits with your values, it’s not sustainable.

So we help you figure out what is it that fits with “all of me,” and we then connect you to those opportunities. Many times with diversity programs, they are focused just on the intake, which is just one component. But you want people to thrive when they get there.

Many times with diversity programs, they are focused just on the intake, which is just one component. But you want people to thrive when they get there.

And so, whether it is building your personal brand or building your board of advisors or continuing with your skill development in a personalized, relevant way -- or access to coaching because often many of us don’t have that unless we are in the C-suite on the way -- we are able to knit that together in a way that is relevant, that’s right-sized for the individual.

For the company, we give them a turnkey solution to invest in a scalable way, to touch more lives across their company, particularly in a more global environment. Rather than having to place multiple bets, they place one bet with Landit. We leverage that one-size-fits-one capability with things that we all know are keys to success. We are then able to have them deliver that again, whether it is to the newly minted managers or people they have just acquired or maybe they are leaders that they want to continue to invest in. We enable them to do that in a measurable way, so that they can see the engagement and the success and the productivity.

Gardner: Alicia, I know that SAP Ariba is already working to provide services to those organizations that are trying to create diversity and inclusion within their supply chains. How do you see Landit fitting into the business network that SAP Ariba is building around diversity?

Tillman: First, the SAP Ariba Network is the largest business to business (B2B) network on the planet. We connect more than 2.5 million companies that transact over $1 trillion in commerce annually. As you can imagine, there is incredible diversity in the buying requirements that exist amongst those companies that are located in all parts of the world and work in virtually every industry.

One of things that we offer as an organization is a Discovery tool. When you have a network that is so large, it can be difficult and a bit daunting for a buyer to find the supplier that meets their business requirements, and for a supplier to find their ideal buyer. So our SAP Ariba Discovery application is a matching service, if you will, that enables a buyer to list their requirements. You then let the tool work for you to allow matching you to suppliers that most meet your requirements, whatever they may be.

I’m very proud to have Lisa present at our Women in Leadership Forum at SAP AribaLIVE 2017. I am showcasing Lisa not only because of her entrepreneurial spirit and the success that she’s had in her career -- that I think will be very inspirational and motivational to women who are looking to continue to develop their careers -- but she has also created a powerful platform with Landit. For women, it helps provide a digital environment that allows them to harness precisely what it is that’s important to them when it comes to career development, and then offers the coaching in the Landit environment to enable that.

For women, it helps provide a digital environment that allows them to harness precisely what it is that’s important to them when it comes to career development.

Landit also offers companies an ability to support their goals around gender diversity. They can look at the Landit platform and source talent that is not only very focused on careers -- but also supports a company in their diversity goals. It’s a tremendous capability that’s necessary and needed in today’s environment.

Gardner: Lisa, what has changed in the past several years that has prompted this changed workforce? We have talked about the business network as an enabler, and we have talked about social networks connecting people. But what's going to be different about the workforce going forward?

Collaborative visibility via networking

Skeete Tatum: There are three main things. First, there is a recognition that diversity is not a “nice to have,” it’s a “must-have” from a competitive standpoint; to acquire the best ideas and gain a better return on capital. So it’s a business imperative to invest in and value diversity within one's workforce. Second, businesses are continuing to shift toward matching opportunities with the people who are best able to do that job, but in a less-biased way. Thirdly, business-as-usual isn’t going to work in this new reality of career management.

Business-as-usual isn’t going to work in this new reality of career management.

It’s no longer one- or bi-directional, where it’s just the manager or the employee. It’s much more collaborative and driven by the individual. And so all of these things … where there is much more opportunity, much more freedom. But how do you anchor that with a problem and a framework and a connectivity that enables someone to more successfully navigate the new environment and new opportunities? How do you leverage and build your network?  Everyone knows they need to do it, but many people don’t know how to do it. Or when your brand is even more important, visibility is more important, how do you develop and communicate your accomplishments and your value? It is the confluence of those things coming together that creates this new world order.

Gardner: Alicia, one of the biggest challenges for most businesses is getting the skills that they need in a timely fashion. How do we get past the difficulty of best matching hiring?  How do we use business networks to help solve that?

Tillman: This is the beauty of technology. Technology is an enabler in business to form relationships more quickly, and to transact more quickly. Similarly, technology also provides a network to help you grow from a development standpoint. Lisa’s organization, Landit, is one example of that.

Within SAP Ariba we are very focused on closing the gap in gaining the skills that are necessary to be successful in today’s business environment. I look at the offering of SAP SuccessFactors - which is  focused on empowering the humancapital management (HCM) organization to lead performance management and career development. And SAP Fieldglass helps companies find and source the right temporary labor that they need to service their most pressing projects. Combine all that with a business network, and there is no better place in today’s environment to find something you need -- and find it quickly.

But it all comes down to the individual’s desire to want to grow their skills, or find new skills, to get out of their comfort zone and try something new. I don’t believe there is a shortage of tools or applications to help enable that growth and talent. It comes down to the individual’s desire to want to grab it and go after it.

Maximize your potential with technology

Skeete Tatum: I couldn’t agree more. The technology and the network are what create the opportunity. In the past, there may have been a skills gap, but you have to be able to label it, you have to be able to identify it in a way that is relevant to the individual. As Alicia said, there are many opportunities out there for development, but how do you parse that down and deliver it to the individual in a way that is relevant -- and that’s actionable? That’s where a network comes in and where the power of one can be leveraged in a scalable way.

Now is probably one of the best times to invest in and have an individual grow to reach their full potential. The desire to meet their goals can be leveraged by technology in a very personal way.

Gardner: As we have been hearing here at SAP Ariba LIVE 2017, more-and-more technologies along the lines of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – are taking advantage of all the data and analyzing it and making it actionable -- can now be brought to bear on this set of issues of matching workforce requirements with skill sets.

Where should we expect to see these technologies reduce the complexity and help companies identify the right workforce, and the workforce identify the right companies?

Having the data and being able to quantify and qualify it gives you the power to set a path forward.

Skeete Tatum: Having the data and being able to quantify and qualify it gives you the power to set a path forward. The beauty is that it actually enables everyone to have the opportunity to contribute, the opportunity to grow, and to create a path and a sense of belonging by having a way to get there. From our perspective, it is that empowerment and that ownership -- but with the support of the network from the overall organization -- that enables someone to move forward. And it enables the organization to be more successful and more embracing of this new workforce, this diverse talent.

Tillman: Individuals should feel more empowered today than ever before to really take their career development to unprecedented levels. There are so many technologies, so many applications out there to help coach you on every level. It’s up to the individual to truly harness what is standing in front of them and to really grab hold of it -- and use it to their advantage to reach their career goal.

Gardner: Lisa, what should you be thinking about from a personal branding perspective when it comes to making the best use of tools like Landit and business networks?

Skeete Tatum: The first thing is that people actually have to think of themselves as a brand, as opposed to thinking that they are bragging or being boastful. The most important brand you have is the brand of you.

The most important brand you have is the brand of you.

Second, people have to realize that this notion of building your brand is something that you nurture and it develops over time. What we believe is important is that we have to make it tangible, we have to make it actionable, and we have to make it bite-size, otherwise it seems overwhelming.

So we have defined what we believe are the 12 key elements for anyone to have a successful brand, such as have you been visible, do you have a strategic plan of you, are you seeking feedback, do you have a regular cadence of interaction with your network, et cetera. Knowing what to do and how to do it and at what cadence and at what level is what enables someone to move forward. And in today’s environment, again, it’s even more important.

Pique their curiosity by promoting your own

Tillman: Employers want to be sure that they are attracting candidates and employing candidates that are really invested in their own development. An employer operates in the best interest of the employee in terms of helping to enable tools and allow for that development to occur. At the same time, where candidates can really differentiate themselves in today’s work environment is when they are sitting across the table and they are in that interview. It's really important for a candidate to talk about his or her own development and what are they doing to constantly learn and support their curiosity.

Employers want curious people. They want those that are taking advantage of development and tools and learning, and these are the things that I think set people apart from one another when they know that individually they are going to go after learning opportunities and push themselves out of their comfort zone to take themselves – and ultimately the companies that employ them - to the next level.

Gardner: Before we close out, let’s take a peek into the crystal ball. What, Alicia, would be your top two predictions given that we are just on sort of an inflection point with this new network, with this new workforce and the networking effect for it?

Tillman: First, technology is only going to continue to improve. Networks have historically enabled buyers and sellers to come together and transact to build their organizations and support growth, but networks are taking on a different form.

Technology is going to continue to enable priorities professionally and priorities personally. Technology is going to become a leading enabler of a person’s professional development.

Second, individuals are going to set themselves apart from others by their desire and their hunger to really grab hold of that technology. When you think about decision-making among companies in terms of candidates they hire and candidates they don’t, employers are going to report back and say, “One of the leading reasons why I selected one candidate over another is because of their desire to learn and their desire to grab hold of technologies and networks that were standing in front of them to bring their careers to an unprecedented level.”

Gardner: Lisa, what are your top two predictions for the new workforce and particularly for diversity playing a bigger role?

Technology ... enables people to bring their full selves, the full measure of their talent, to the workplace.

Skeete Tatum: Technology is the ultimate leveler of the playing field. It enables companies as well as the individual to make decisions based on things that matter. That is what enables people to bring their full selves, the full measure of their talent, to the workplace.

In terms of networks in particular, they have always been a key element to success but now they are even more important. It actually poses a special challenge for diverse talent. They are often not part of the network, and they may have competing personal responsibilities that make the investment of the time and the frequency in those relationships a challenge.

Sometimes there is a discomfort with how to do it. We believe that through technology people will have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. They need to learn not only how to codify their network, but also have the right access to the right person with the right cadence, and access to that know how, that guidance, can be delivered through technology.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

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The next line of defense—How new security leverages virtualization to counter sophisticated threats

When it comes to securing systems and data, the bad guys are constantly upping their games -- finding new ways to infiltrate businesses and users. Those who protect systems from these cascading threats must be ever vigilant for new technical advances in detection and protection. In fact, they must out-innovate their assailants.

The next BriefingsDirect security insights discussion examines the relationship between security and virtualization. We will now delve into how adaptive companies are finding ways to leverage their virtualization environments to become more resilient, more intelligent, and how they can protect themselves in new ways.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

To learn how to ensure that virtualized data centers do not pose risks -- but in fact prove more defensible -- we are joined by two security-focused executives, Kurt Roemer, Chief Security Strategist at Citrix, and Harish Agastya, Vice President for Enterprise Solutions at Bitdefender. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Kurt, virtualization has become widespread and dominant within data centers over the past decade. At that same time, security has risen to the very top of IT leadership’s concerns. What is it about the simultaneous rise of virtualization and the rise of security concerns? Is there any intersection? Is there any relationship that most people may miss?

Roemer: The rise of virtualization and security has been concurrent. A lot of original deployments for virtualization technologies were for remote access, but they were also for secure remote access. The apps that people needed to get access to remotely were usually very substantial applications for the organization --  things like order processing or partner systems; they might have been employee access to email or internal timecard systems. These were things that you didn’t really want an attacker messing with -- or arbitrary people getting access to.

Roemer

Security has grown from just providing basic access to virtualization to really meeting a lot of the risks of these virtualized applications being exposed to the Internet in general, as well as now expanding out into the cloud. So, we have had to grow security capabilities to be able to not only keep up with the threat, but try to keep ahead of it as well.

Gardner: Hasn’t it historically been true that most security prevention technologies have been still focused at the operating system (OS)-level, not so much at the virtualization level? How has that changed over the past several years?

Roemer: That’s a good question. There have been a lot of technologies that are associated with virtualization, and as you go through and secure and harden your virtual environments, you really need to do it from the hardware level, through the hypervisor, through the operating system level, and up into the virtualization system and the applications themselves.

We are now seeing people take a much more rigorous approach at each of those layers, hardening the virtualization system and the OS and integrating in all the familiar security technologies that we’re used to, like antivirus, but also going through and providing for application-specific security.

So if you have a SAP system or something else where you need to protect some very sensitive company data and you don’t want that data to be accessed outside the office arbitrarily, you can provide very set interfaces into that system, being able to control the clipboard or copy and paste, what peripherals the application can interface with; i.e., turn off the camera, turn off the microphone if it’s not needed, and even get down to the level of with the browser, whether things like JavaScript is enabled or Flash is available.

So it helps to harden the overall environment and cut down on a lot of the vulnerabilities that would be inherent by just leaving things completely wide open. One of the benefits of virtualization is that you can get security to be very specific to the application.

Gardner: Harish, now that we are seeing this need for comprehensive security, what else is it that people perhaps don’t understand that they can do in the virtualization layer? Why is virtualization still uncharted territory as we seek to get even better security across the board?

Let’s get better than physical

Agastya

Agastya: Customers often don’t realize when they are dealing with security in physical or virtual environments. The opportunities that virtual environments provide to them are to have the ability to take security to a higher level than physical-only. So better than physical is, I think, a key value proposition that they can benefit from -- and the technology innovation of today has enabled that.

There is a wave of innovation among security vendors in this space. How do we run resource-intensive security workloads in a way that does not compromise the service-level agreements (SLAs) that those information technology operations (IT Ops) administrators need to deliver?

There is a lot of work happening to offload security-scanning mechanisms on to dedicated security virtual appliances, for example. Bitdefender has been working withpartners like Citrix to enable that.

Now, the huge opportunity is to take that story further in terms of being able to provide higher levels of visibility, detection, and prevention from the attacks of today, which are advanced persistent threats. We seek to detect how they manifest in the data center and -- in a virtual environment -- what you have the opportunity to do, and how you can respond. That game is really changing now.

Gardner: Kurt, is there something about the ability to spin up virtualized environments, and then take them down that provides a risk that the bad guys can target or does that also provide an opportunity to start fresh: To eliminate vulnerabilities, or learn quickly and adapt quickly? Is there something about the rapid change that virtualization enables that is a security plus?

Persistent protection anywhere

Roemer: You really hit on the two sides of the coin. On one side, virtualization does oftentimes provide an image of the application or the applications plus OS that could be fairly easy for a hacker to steal and be able to spin up offline and be able to get access to secrets. So you want to be able to protect your images, to make sure that they are not something that can be easily stolen.

On the other side, having the ability to define persistence -- what do you want to have to persist between reboots versus what’s non-persistent -- allows you to have a constantly refreshed system. So when you reboot it, it’s exactly back to the golden image -- and everything is as it should be. As you patch and update you are working with a known quantity as opposed to the endpoint where somebody might have administrative access and it has installed personal applications and plug-ins to their browser and other things like that that you may or may not want to have in placer.

The nice thing with virtualization is that it’s independent of the OS, the applications, the endpoints, and the varied situations that we all access our apps and data from.

Layering also comes into play and helps to make sure that you can dynamically layer in applications or components of the OS, depending on what’s needed. So if somebody is accessing a certain set of functionality in the office, maybe they have 100% functionality. But when they go home, because they are no longer in a trusted environment or maybe not working on a trusted PC from their home system, they get a degraded experience, seeing fewer applications and having less functionality layered onto the OS. Maybe they can’t save to local drives or print to local printers. All of that’s defined by policy. The nice thing with virtualization is that it’s independent of the OS, the applications, the endpoints, and the varied situations that we all access our apps and data from.

Gardner: Harish, with virtualization that there is a certain level of granularity as to how one can manage their security environment parameters. Can you expand on why having that granular capability to manage parameters is such a strong suit, and why virtualization is a great place to make that happen?

On the move, virtually

Agastya: That is one of the opportunities and challenges that security solutions need to be able to cope with.

As workloads are moving across different subgroups, sub-networks, that virtual machine (VM) needs to have a security policy that moves with it. It depends on what type of application is running, and it is not specific to the region or sub-network that that particular VM is resident on. That is something that security solutions that are designed to operate in virtual environments have the ability to do.

Security moves with the workload, as the workload is spawned off and new VMs are created. The same set of security policies associated with that workload now can protect that workload without needing to have a human step in and determine what security posture needs to belong to that VM. 

See the IDC White Paper, Hypervisor Introspection: A Transformative Approach to Advanced Attack Detection.

That is the opportunity that virtualization provides. But it’s also a challenge. For example, maybe the previous generations of solutions predated all of this. We now need to try and address that.

We love the fact that virtualization is happening and that it has become a very elastic software-defined mechanism that moves around and gives the IT operations people so much more control. It allows an opportunity to be able to sit very well in that environment and provide security that works tightly integrated with the virtualization layer.

Gardner: I hear this so much these days that IT operations people are looking for more automation, and more control.

Kurt, I think it’s important to understand that when we talk about security within a virtualization layer, that doesn’t obviate the value of security that other technologies provide at the OS level or network level. So this isn’t either-or, this is an augmentation, isn’t that correct, when we talk about virtualization and security?

The virtual focus

Roemer: Yes, that’s correct. Virtualization provides some very unique assets that help extend security, but there are some other things that we want to be sure to focus on in terms of virtualization. One of them is Bitdfender Hypervisor Introspection (HVI). It’s the ability for the hypervisor to provide a set of direct inspect application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow for inspection of guest memory outside of the guest.

When you look at Windows or Linux guests that are running on a hypervisor, typically when you have tried to secure those it’s been through technology installed in the guest. So you have the guest that’s self-protecting, and they are relying on OS APIs to be able to effect security. Sometimes that works really well and sometimes the attackers get around OS privileges and are successful, even with security solutions in place.

One of the things that HVI does is it looks for the techniques that would be associated with an attack against the memory of the guest from outside the guest. It’s not relying on the OS APIs and can therefore catch attacks that otherwise would have slipped past the OS-based security functionality.

Gardner: Harish, maybe you can tell us about how Citrix and Bitdefender are working together?

Step into the breach, together

Agastya: The solution is Bitdefender HVI. It works tightly with Citrix’s XenServer hypervisor, and it has been available in a controlled release for the last several months. We have had some great customer traction on it. At Citrix Synergy this year wewill be making that solution generally available.

We have been working together for the last four years to bring this groundbreaking technology to the market.

What is the problem we are trying to solve? It is the issue of advanced attacks that hit the data center when, as Kurt mentioned, advanced attackers are able to skirt past endpoint security defense mechanisms by having root access and operating at the same level of privilege as the endpoint security that may be running within the VM.

They can then essentially create a blind spot where the attackers can do anything they want while the endpoint security solution continues to run. 

See the IDC White Paper, Hypervisor Introspection: A Transformative Approach to Advanced Attack Detection.

These types of attacks stay in the environment and the customer suffers on average 200 days before a breach is discovered. The marketplace is filled with stories like this and it’s something that we have been working together with Citrix to address.

The fundamental solution leverages the power of the hypervisor to be able to monitor attacks that modify memory. It does that by looking for the common attack mechanisms that all these attackers use, whether it’s buffer overflows or it’s heap spraying, the list goes on.

They all result in memory modification that the endpoint security solution within the VM is blinded to. However, if you are leveraging the direct inspect APIs that Kurt talked about -- available as part of Citrix’s XenServer solution – then we have the ability to look into that VM without having a footprint in there. It is a completely agentless solution that runs outside the security virtual appliance. It monitors all of the VMs in the data center against these types of attacks. It allows you to take action immediately, reduces the time to detection and blocks the attack.

Gardner: Kurt, what are some of the major benefits for the end-user organization in deploying something like HVI? What is the payback in business terms?

Performance gains

Roemer: Hypervisor Introspection, which we introduced in XenServer 7.1, allows an organization to deploy virtualization with security technologies behind it at the hypervisor level. What that means for the business is that every guest you bring up has protection associated with it. Even if it’s a new version of Linux that you haven’t previously tested and you really don’t know which antivirus you would have integrated with it; or something that you are working on from an appliance perspective -- anything that can run on XenServer would be protected through these direct inspect APIs, and the Bitdefender HVI solution. That’s really exciting.

It also has performance benefits because you don’t have to run antivirus in every guest at the same level. By knowing what’s being protected at the hypervisor level, you can configure for a higher level of performance.

Now, of course, we always recommend having antivirus in guests, as you still have file-based access and so you need to look for malware, and sometimes files get emailed in or out or produced, and so having access to the files from an anti-malware perspective is very valuable.

So for the business, HVI gives you higher security, it gives you better performance, and the assurance that you are covered.

But you may need to cut down some of the scanning functionality and be able to meet much higher performance objectives. 

Gardner: Harish, it sounds like this ability to gain introspection into that hypervisor is wonderful for security and does it in such a way that it doesn’t degrade performance. But it seems to me that there are also other ancillary benefits in addition to security, when you have that ability to introspect and act quickly. Is there more than just a security benefit, that the value could go quite a bit further?

The benefits of introspection

Agastya: That’s true. The ability to introspect into memory has huge potential in the market. First of all, with this solution right now, we address the ability to detect advanced attacks, which is a very big problem in the industry -- where you have everything from nation-sponsored attacks to deep dark web, malicious components, attack components available to common citizens who can do bad things with them.

The capability to reduce that window to advanced attack detection is huge. But now with the power of introspection, we also have the ability to inject, on the fly, into the VM, additional solutions tools that can do deep forensics, measure network operations and the technology can expand to cover more. The future is bright for where we can take this between our companies.

Gardner: Kurt, anything to add on the potential for this memory introspection capability?

Specific, secure browsers

Roemer: There are a couple things to add. One is taking a look at the technologies and just rolling back through a lot of the exploits that we have seen, even throughout the last three months. There have been exploits against Microsoft Windows, exploits against Internet Explorer and Edge, hypervisors, there’s been EternalBlue and the Server Message Block (SMB) exploits. You can go back and be able to try these out against the solution and be able to see exactly how it would catch them, and what would have happened to your system had those exploits actually taken effect.

If you have a team that is doing forensics and trying to go through and determine whether systems had previously been exploited, you are giving that team additional functionality to be able to look back and see exactly how the exploits would have worked. Then they can understand better how things would have happened within their environment. Because you are doing that outside of the guest, you have a lot of visibility and a lot of information you otherwise wouldn't have had.

One big expanded use-case here is to get the capability for HVI between Citrix and Bitdefender in the hands of your security teams, in the hands of your forensics teams, and in the hands of your auditors -- so that they can see exactly what this tool brings to the table.

See the IDC White Paper, Hypervisor Introspection: A Transformative Approach to Advanced Attack Detection.

Something else you want to look at is the use-case that allows users to expand what they are doing and makes their lives easier -- and that's secured browsing.

Today, when people go out and browse the Internet or hit a popular application like Facebook or Outlook Web Access -- or if you have an administrator who is hitting an administrative console for your Domain Name System (DNS) environment, your routers, your Cisco, Microsoft environments, et cetera, oftentimes they are doing that via a web browser.

One big expanded use-case here is to get the capability for HVI between Citrix and Bitdefender in the hands of your security teams.

Well, if that's the same web browser that they use to do everything else on their PC, it's over-configured, it presents excessive risk, and you now have the opportunity with this solution to publish browsers that are very specific to each use.

For example, you publish one browser specifically for administrative access, and you know that you have advanced malware detection. Even if somebody is trying to target your administrators, you are able to thwart their ability to get in and take over the environments that the administrators are accessing.

As more things move to the browser -- and more very sensitive and critical applications move to the cloud -- it's extremely important to set up secured browsing. We strongly recommend doing this with XenServer and HVI along with Bitdefender providing security.

Agastya: The problem in the market with respect to the human who is sitting in front of the browser being the weakest link in the chain is a very important one. Many, many different technology approaches have been taken to address this problem -- and most of them have struggled to make it work.

The value of XenApp coming in with its secured browser model is this: You can stream your browser and you are just presenting, rendering an interface on the client device, but the browser is actually running in the backend, in the data center, running on XenServer, protected by Bitdefender HVI. This model not only allows you to shift the threat away from the client device, but also kill it completely, because that exploit which previously would have run on the client device is not on the client device anymore. It’s not even on the server anymore because HVI has gotten to it and stopped it.

Roemer: I bring up the browser benefit as an example because when you think of the lonely browser today, it is the interface to some of your most critical applications. A browser, at the same time, is also connected to your file system, your network, your Windows registry, your certificate chain and keys -- it’s basically connected to everything you do and everything you have access to in most OSes.

What we are talking about here is publishing a browser that is very specific to purpose and configured for an individual application. Just put an icon out there, users click on it and everything works for them silently in the background. By being able to redirect hyperlinks over to the new joint XenServer-Bitdefender solution, you are not only protecting against known applications and things that you would utilize -- but you can also redirect arbitrary links.

Even if you tell people, “don’t click on any links”, you know every once in a while it’s going to happen. When that one person clicks on the link and takes down the entire network, it’s awful. Ransomware attacks happen like that all the time. With this solution, that arbitrary link would be redirected over to a one-time use browser. Bitdefender would come up and say, “Hey, yup, there’s definitely a problem here, we are going to shut this down,” and the attack never would have had a chance to get anywhere.

What we are talking about here is publishing a browser that is very specific to purpose and configured for an individual application.

The organization is notified and can take additional remediatative actions. It’s a great opportunity to really change how people are working and take this arbitrary link problem and the ransomware problem and neutralize it.

Gardner: It sounds revolutionary rather than evolutionary when it comes to security. It’s quite impressive. I have learned a lot in just the last week or two in looking into this. Harish, you mentioned earlier that before the general availability being announced in May for Bitdefender HVI on XenServer that you have had this in beta. Do you have any results from that? Can you offer any metrics of what’s happened in the real world when people deploy this? Are the results as revolutionary as it sounds?

Real-world rollout

Agastya: The product was first in beta and then released in controlled availability mode, so the product is actually in production deployment at several companies in both North America and Europe. We have a few financial services companies, and we have some hospitals. We have put the product to use in production deployments for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments where the customers are running XenApp and XenDesktop on top of XenServer with Bitdefender HVI.

We have server workloads running straight on XenServer, too. These are typically application workloads that the financial services companies or the hospitals need to run. We have had some great feedback from them. Some of them have become references as well, and we will be talking more about it at Citrix Synergy 2017, so stay tuned. We are very excited about the fact that the product is able to provide value in the real world.

Roemer: We have a very detailed white paper on how to set up the secured browsing solution, the joint solution between Citrix and Bitdefender. Even if you are running other hypervisors in your environment, I would recommend that you set up this solution and try redirecting some arbitrary hyperlinks over to it, to see what value you are going to get in your organization. It’s really straightforward to set up and provides a considerable amount of additional security visibility.

See the IDC White Paper, Hypervisor Introspection: A Transformative Approach to Advanced Attack Detection.

Bitdefender also has some really amazing videos that show exactly how the solution can block some of the more popular exploits from this year. They are really impressive to watch.

Gardner: Kurt, we are about out of time, but I was curious, what’s the low-lying fruit? Harish mentioned government, VDI, healthcare. Is it the usual suspects with compliance issues hanging over their heads that are the low-lying fruit, or are there other organizations that would be ripe to enjoy the benefits?

Roemer: I would say compliance environments and anybody with regulatory requirements would very much be low-lying fruit for this, but anybody who has sensitive applications or very sensitive use-cases, too. Oftentimes, we hear things like outsourcing as being one of the more sensitive use-cases because you have external third parties who are getting in and either developing code for you, administering part of the operating environment, or something else.

We have also seen a pretty big uptick in terms of people being interested in this for administering the cloud. As you move up to cloud environments and you are defining new operating environments in the cloud while putting new applications up in the cloud, you need to make sure that your administrative model is protected.

Oftentimes, you use a browser directly to provide all of the security interfaces for the cloud, and by publishing that browser and putting this solution in front of it, you can make sure that malware is not interrupting your ability to securely administer the cloud environment.

Gardner: Last question to you, Harish. What should organizations do to get ready for this? I hope we have enticed them to learn more about it. For those organizations that actually might want to deploy, what do they need to think about in order to be in the best position to do that?

A new way of life

Agastya: Organizations need to think aboutsecure virtualization as a way of life within organizational behavior. As a result, I think we will start to see more people with titles like Security DevOps (SecDevOps).

As far as specifically using HVI, organizations should be worried about how advanced attacks could enter their data center and potentially result in a very, very dangerous breach and the loss of confidential intellectual property.

If you are worried about that, you are worried about ransomware because an end-user sitting in front of a client browser is potentially putting out your address. You will want to think about a technology like HVI. The first step for that is to talk to us and there is a lot of information on the Bitdefender website as well as on Citrix’s website.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Bitdefender.

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