Axent Lays Out E-Security Strategy - Axent Technologies - Company Business and Marketing

ENT, August 18, 1999 by Thomas Sullivan

Axent Technologies Inc. (www.axent.com) unveiled a security strategy to facilitate secure e-business and e-commerce initiatives.

Axent's strategy, which combines products and services, is based on the company's Lifecycle Security solutions. The Axent plan is expected to assess, protect, enable and manage security issues that are related to the challenges of conducting business over the Internet. Axent also introduced the Smart Security Architecture to support the initiative. Smart Security helps customers implement levels of security guided by their business needs.

According to a recent report by Forrester Research Inc. (www.forrester.com), 80 percent of companies say security is one of the biggest barriers that is preventing electronic links with customers and partners.

"The demand for e-commerce and e-business applications has moved security from a back-end technology for protecting data to a critical business enabler," said John Becker, CEO and chairman of Axent, in a statement.

Steven Foote, senior vice president at Hurwitz Group (www.hurwitz.com), says established companies are racing to the Internet in an attempt to hold their own against Internet start-ups, such as Amazon.com. But this movement of critical data to the Internet requires the appropriate level of security.

"[Many companies] need a security partner to help them quickly assess their risks and deploy the appropriate level of security necessary to protect and enable new business initiatives," Foote says.

To aid these companies, Axent's strategy includes an outline of a client's products and services, broken into solution sets that help an organization identify security risks and align them with the particular business challenges facing the organization.

The Lifecycle Security approach implements the right level of security by helping customers prioritize the budgets and resources necessary to select, deploy and manage the amount of security needed for a particular e-business initiative. The Lifecycle Security model addresses the cyclical, dynamic nature of e-security and Internet-enabled businesses.

As part of the Lifecycle Security model, Axent offers products that assess vulnerabilities and ensure policy compliance; protect critical information with perimeter security and detect attacks to information; enable secure Internet communications between mobile employees, remote operations, suppliers, customers and other businesses; and manage and administer users and resources.

In addition to products, Axent's Lifecycle Security approach provides services to implement and deploy e-security solutions. These services include consulting, training and customer support to assist customers before, during and after the implementation of security solutions.

The strategy also contains four initiatives for Axent products: consolidated data and policies, common components, integrated views across solutions and security service.

Axent's Security Data Warehouse holds event data to facilitate auditing, reporting, logging and management. The warehouse enables corporations to leverage security information, including corporate security policies, across multiple solutions.

Common components - such as Microsoft Management Console interfaces, event handling, directory extensions, public key infrastructure (PKI) and agents and protocols - ease development and provide integration for Axent's products.

Integrated views of the services implemented will be provided through a real-time monitor that displays a consolidated view of exceptional events and actions taken. The views will centralize the administration of users, policies, incident reporting and ongoing activity. The views can also be integrated into industry frameworks from Axent partners BMC Software Inc. (www.bmc. com), Tivoli Systems Inc. (www.tivoli. com) and Hewlett-Packard Co.

Security services in the form of product suites provide assessment services and intrusion detection protection. The goal of this structure is to help companies to implement one or more security services, depending on each company's needs.