The cybersecurity landscape is getting increasingly complex as companies are tasked with preventing and fighting threats seemingly coming from everywhere. Rewind a couple of decades and firewalls were the main line of defense. But with cloud adoption exploding, bring your own devices to work the norm and mobile apps replacing some desktop software programs, companies are left scrambling to protect all of the entry points into their systems from hackers. At the same time, they lack the in-house skills to take care of it all and are increasingly turning to outsourcing for help.
“Ninety percent of companies don’t have the expertise in-house. They need help,” said Martin Holste CTO, Cloud at FireEye in an interview with The SaaS Report. “We’re seeing a huge need of late.”
Aiming to counter that lack of in-house skills, FireEye in early October announced expertise on-demand, a new service that provides customers with access to a community of FireEye experts on a subscription basis. Customers can also put FireEye on a retainer through its Mandiant Incident Response Retainer service in which Mandiant service professionals are always on standby, which reduces a company’s need to have an in-house response team. “For years now the skills gap has only been growing as the amount of expertise it takes to figure out what's going on with any security incident is increasing,” said Holste. “It's rare that a company employs enough people to take care of significant incidents.”
But its community-driven approach to protecting organizations from cyber attacks doesn’t stop there. In conjunction with expertise on demand, it announced FireEye Market, a community-driven approach to protecting organizations from cyber attacks. The idea is that since every organization is connected to the Internet and many face the same cyber threats they can all benefit from sharing resources and knowledge. They can also collaborate through the marketplace to create new tools and methods to stop the hackers in their tracks or at least mitigate some of the risks.
The FireEye Market is an open developer ecosystem of apps, plugins, add-ons, and content, enabling the community to more easily find and access free tools and product extensions that enhance the capabilities of the products they have already purchased. It's also aiming to simplify the whole process of finding content to expand the weapons companies have in their arsenal. In the beginning, FireEye said the marketplace will be focused on existing open-source software, freeware and community developed tools but will expand that to enable customers and partners to contribute to the marketplace themselves. Holste said "FireEye Market is an extension of FireEye Helix, which is a security operations platform that matches events from systems, networks, and clouds against FireEye’s attacker-informed rules, analytics, and threat intelligence.”
While threat intel sharing isn’t anything new it's often among small groups and organizations that have extreme trust between each other. With the FireEye Market, the cybersecurity company is aiming to expand that on a much larger scale. He noted that some of those intel sharing communities have been infiltrated by bad actors who will inject malicious code into something they are purportedly sharing. “Our dream is to be curators,” said Holste, noting FireEye will vet the content that may come to it from outside the organization so that it is creating a marketplace that is based on extreme trust.
