IT Week: As chief executive of
Intelliden, could you explain how
policy-based compliance management can benefit network managers?
Black: Our policy-based compliance management tool defines network policies, and
then manages and validates network hardware configurations continuously and
automatically. It can flag up out-of-compliance network kit and then resolve
that non-compliancy.
What companies do you target?
We focus on any network-driven enterprise, be it a service provider, large
financial institution, retailers or logistics firms. They tend to be large
enterprises with hundreds or thousands of network devices.
How big an issue is compliance?
I’d be surprised if there were many companies in the pharmaceutical and
financial industries that haven’t been audited. The day’s going to come when
somebody will be made an example of. IT managers have to demonstrate that they
have the means to audit their networks and that their information is secure.
Managed service providers are also under pressure to demonstrate that their
customers’ networks are secure.
How long does it take your technology to check the compliance status
of network devices?
Once our systems are installed, it takes about two hours to “import” a network,
which means capturing network device configurations and comparing them against
whatever policies a firm has implemented to ensure compliance with specific
regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
How would Intelliden’s technology work in virtualised
environments?
Imagine a Venn diagram with two sets, one marked “datacentre infrastructure” and
the other “network infrastructure”. The overlap will get greater as firms merge
server and network infrastructures. IT managers are trying to reduce datacentre
cost by consolidation and trimming operating costs. But currently the big p
roblem is that nobody has had a system to manage the heterogeneous elements in
there routers, switches, Windows and Linux servers. But our software can; we
know the precise physical and logical capabilities of these devices in real time
and we’ve modelled those unique capabilities. So if a change needs to be made to
a device, for example a firmware upgrade, no changes will be made until our
software verifies that the change will actually work and also that it won’t
break the compliance policy.
