Micro Focus Cybersecurity Summit Recap
Introduction
This past week, Concensus Technologies was a silver sponsor of the Micro Focus Cybersecurity Summit in Dallas, Texas. The annual conference highlights how Micro Focus helps enterprises deliver a pragmatic approach to Digital Transformation.
The two-day conference focused on the products within their Security, Risk, and Governance portfolio, but many of the exciting things showcased are within their predictive analytics portfolio.
Day 1 – Keynote and Interset Highlights
John Delk (@johnrdelk) Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager of the Security, Risk, and Governance practice, kicked off the conference and energized the crowd of attendees.
He talked about how Cybersecurity is now a board-level concern for enterprises and how funding has grown 300% over the past 6 years—and continues to rise.
John introduced discussed how Cybersecurity and securing people and their data was vastly simpler back in the day. Now though, a holistic, analytics-drive approach is needed to secure identities, applications, and data.
Up next was Stephan Jou (@eeksock), CTO at Interset:
Stephan discussed Analytics & Machine Learning. He explained the key differences and showed how unsupervised machine learning can lead to more direct and qualified threat leads. While humans could potentially perform these tasks, Stephan shared how it would take a substantial amount of our time to process—in some cases, even our entire lifetime!
He also shared several examples of how Interset products can help identify insider threats. While many organizations focus only on the North/South boundary (external attacks), insiders operate East/West behind the firewall.
Fascinating stuff!
Ottawa-based Interset was acquired in February of 2019 and is already showing value within the Micro Focus portfolio.
Their model and vision for security analytics applies multiple types of math with established and well-known algorithms (for more, take a look at their presentation on data science 101 and data science 102). The end result is that you can actually find the threats and act with the best possible response to those threats. That is a game changer!
We also attended the Interset Data Science 101 presented by Stephan. He applies a perfect analogy of self-diagnosing his own child to detecting a cyber security threat. The take-away from this presentation is that you can use the analytics to detect abnormal behaviors in the individual, such as:
- Unusual day/time access to a folder or system
- Printing a large number of documents over time
- Checking out more source cold files than expected
Interset’s products are not about replacing SEIM systems, but rather augmenting, by digesting the information along with other logs and data to apply machine learning.
Day 2 – Identity Manager/Governance and Access Manager
Day 2 was all about the roadmap sessions. We attended a few roadmaps of our favorite products. Here are some highlights from the sessions we attended.
Identity Governance Strategy and Roadmap
Micro Focus has been quietly gaining traction with their Identity Governance and Administration product and working toward a unified solution with Identity Manager. There is also an ongoing shift to “containerizing” each product.
Rick Wagner, Director, Product Management at Micro Focus, presented the new architecture and reinforced the fact that no product is going to be replaced in this new solution. The products are going to be integrated/containerized and you will still be able to get them separately or turn on the features you need when you need them. You can see his presentation here. Here are a few products from the roadmap that are releasing soon.
Identity Manager 4.8 – 2H 2019
Concensus is watching this release closely, because it will be here before we know it. This version will be containerized and include new forms (forms.io based) managed without designer. We are working with Micro Focus to include a new version of the Google and Banner Driver. Look forward to this blog post in the coming months.
eDirectory 9.2 – 2H 2019
eDirectory 9.2 will also be containerized and include REST endpoints. This will enable developers to create webservices that interact with the directory. A new Identity Console is being developed to manage identities.
Identity Intelligence – Futures
The concept of Identity Intelligence is to improve the capabilities of reporting services. It is too early to discuss this as a product but what will be interesting is that it will cover multiple products. An early concept shows a timeline that highlights an Identity Lifecycle Event, a workflow event, a governance event and finally an access event.
Access Manager and the New Secure API Manager
For those of you running Access Manager, you know how powerful the product can be. It is the Swiss Army knife of Access Management. With single sign-on, risk-based authentication, integration with MFA providers, federation and cloud deployment how could it get any better?
Access Manager 5.0 is coming in the second half of 2019. AM 5.0 will be delivered as a container, have a patch management channel, and be available in AWS or Azure catalogs.
Secure API Manager 1.0 is now available worldwide from Micro Focus. Are you developing your own applications with APIs or need to restrict access to APIs from vendors internally? If so, you will love how Secure API Manager plugs into Access Manager. Not only can you restrict the number of API calls from a client per day/month/hour—but you can also add the great features of Access Manager, such as risk-based authentication, all without having to modify your code.
Final Thoughts
Micro Focus has a very powerful set of products from multiple acquisitions. The sessions over the last few days have showed us how they are integrating these products together to enhance customers’ investments in their software. We think the future of these products has never been stronger. The push to make these products available as a service, on-premise, and hybrid is the right call. This will be the ultimate in flexibility to meet the diverse needs of their customers.
Remember that Concensus is a development, consulting, hosting and fulfillment partner of Micro Focus software. If you would learn how we can help your organization, let us know!
