Security platforms with open application programming interfaces (APIs) are set to turn the business model for the information security on its head, according to Mark McLaughlin, president and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.
“We need a new model that will drive more innovation, value and encourage sharing of threat intelligence in highly automated ways, enable things to happen faster with less human intervention, be easier to deploy and have a lot more flexibility in the usage and consumption options,” he told the 2017 RSA Conference in San Francisco .
For such a security platform to work, McLaughlin said it would have to include sensors to get the data, the ability to enforce decisions reached on the basis of the data, be more focused on users rather than locations and it would have to be able to hold and consume a lot of data.
It would also have to include things such asmachine learning and analytics, and it will have to be open from an API perspective, he added.
Once such security platforms are a reality, he predicts this will enable a lot of innovation because developers will be able to write for those platforms without having to do all the data collection, storage, integration and analysis for themselves.
“This means users will be able to turn on or turn off hundreds of capabilities from hundreds of suppliers as and when they need to and only when they find value in it by using software as a service [SaaS] consumption models,” said McLaughlin.“If we get to what I am talking about, probably the main measure of success will be that instead of people saying I have 90 different suppliers and I have to figure out what to do with all that from a complexity, consumption and cost perspective, those same people will be saying I have 400 security suppliers and I am fine with that.”
With innovation happening on top of a security platform , McLaughlin said organisations will be able to tap into all the security innovation they want or need without the complexity or cost associated with existing business models.
Similarly, developers will be able to innovate faster and at lower cost by exploiting all that the underlying security platform has to offer.
“This approach will drive a new concept of ecosystems around security that are going to be application developer ecosystems for things very smart people will do when they have all that data and analytics capability and the ability to enforce decisions. All they have to do is think about what the innovation around that is going to be,” he said.