How is the security business today different from what
it was earlier?
Everybody understands that we can't carry on the way we have, and remain
confined to silos. The change is that we are seeing collaboration between
vendors, and we are seeing more of that. Getting into a standards environment is
our ultimate goal.
Collaboration is a necessary step for the industry.
Collaboration between vendors is covering a wide spectrum from Cisco friendly to
the ardent competitor, and also between vendors and service providers. And, they
all need to be part of the collaboration strategy.
Hasn't that collaboration been happening for some time
now, with the growth of open systems and protocols?
What we are seeing now is more sophisticated collaboration. A protocol that
defines how an IPS event is developed is one thing, but developing a whole
framework like the network and mission control framework that has several
protocols associated with it, and which also have the algorithms required to
process those protocols-that is a much larger collaboration exercise. Today,
that kind of collaboration is happening a lot more.
When we introduced adaptive security, we partnered with
service providers to get them qualified specifically for security services.
Because customers are willing to pay for that, it is a way out for service
providers to increase ARPU.
With Cisco coming out with a few desktop products
lately, do we see a shift in the company's focus?
Cisco's long-term commitment is not to build up so much security
capability in the endpoints, we definitely want to stay in the network. Having
said that, a self-defending network means a self-defending IT infrastructure. So
we need to collaborate with endpoint vendors in order to ensure that the self
defending infrastructure is viable.
Do you have any offering for mobile service providers
and subscribers?
For mobile service providers, 90% of their security requirements are the
same as wireline of fixed service providers. They only have a special 10%
extension for their mobile service and the fact that they have data on GPRS. For
mobile security, as in the IT world, for security measures to get strengthened,
standards would have to be developed.
We are actively working on mobile security, we're going
to have IP2; making changes to our security code to accommodate hundreds of
thousands of devices. That development work is actively going on now for the
head end security.
For mobile subscribers, what we plan to do is to download a
Cisco secured desktop (we do this to laptops and desktops today) which sets up a
security vault on the smart-phone to ensure that data on the smart-phone is
protected from any Trojan, or spyware that may be on the phone.
Alok Singh
aloksi@cybermedia.co.in
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