GDPR demands any and all breaches involving EU citizen PII data be reported in 72 hours.  This notification must include the exact data records accessed. Inability to comply can result in serious implications, including fines as large as 4% of revenue or twenty million euros. GDPR makes it critical to quickly contain if not eliminate the impact of breaches, and with CSPi's Myricom nVoy solution working in combination with Fortinet's Security Fabric organizations can complete a breach investigation in hours, dramatically improving breach response.

Fortinet's John Maddison recently talked with Gary Southwell, Managing Director, about CSPi's security priorities and the tools they produce to keep customers' information secure through automated breach identification and notification, consequently avoiding loss of reputation and incurring compliance fines.

Tell us a bit about your business and the types of customers that you serve. What is the top IT challenge or concern that your customers face today?

Many people are surprised to learn that CSPi is a 50-year-old public company and that we have been involved in security, particularly data capture, for many years.  You'll find our technology as part of in-theater defense radar programs, as well as used by US intelligence agencies to fight the war on terror.

As far as customers are concerned, they continue to struggle with the massive amount of data generated by security tools. On average, an SMB company can receive up to five thousand alerts a day.  Top that with the need to comply with different data privacy regulations, spanning the US and Europe, as well as industry-specific verticals like Finance.

Today's leading firewall and IPS solutions, like FortiGate, do a great job identifying potential intrusions but the volume of alerts they generate make it challenging for InfoSec teams to keep up with investigating and verifying breaches. Data privacy regulation, of which there are many, can be complex, and different from each other, often creating conflicting requirements.  Most concerning is that breach notification requirements are becoming more stringent, case in point being GDPR's 72-hour deadline.

You recently joined Fortinet's Fabric-Ready Partner Program. Can you share a bit about your history of working with Fortinet and why being a partner in our program is important for your business and customers?

For quite some time, CSPI's IT managed services and security services division have included Fortinet technology to support our customers.  Therefore, it just made sense for us to integrate FortiGate into our nVoy solution as we saw first-hand the immense value that FortiGate firewalls brought to the market.    

The integration between FortiGate and nVoy seamlessly enables our joint customers to overcome the most pressing challenges presented by data breaches.  Our security solution is the only one on the market that automatically cuts through the alert noise, in real-time, to verify breaches, and provides the concrete proof that is needed to meet stringent data privacy regulations.

Are you seeing a shift in IT, networking, and cybersecurity buying criteria from your customers towards solutions that are by nature more open, automated, and able to interoperate with their existing infrastructure?

We are seeing all three. The need for automated verification of breaches has become even more critical, especially since it is almost certain that humans will miss the one breach that is hidden among the five thousand intrusion alerts. With organizations leveraging a stack of discreet security tools, each optimized to fulfill a network security task, the emphasis has moved from best-of-breed solutions to consolidated security infrastructure for simplified management and reduced IT overhead.

Securing highly dynamic and distributed network environments requires automation and integrated security solutions that can share intelligence and synchronize breach responses to threats in real time. This frees organizations to focus on the business at large, and imparts confidence in the knowledge that their critical assets are secure and can meet data privacy compliance requirements. The Fortinet and CSPi solution integration is a perfect example of this -it automatically monitors data that matters most to the organization, and upon breach verification provides detailed reporting for actionable forensic analysis.

GDPR is coming soon and is top of mind for many global companies doing business in the EU. What are you hearing from customers when it comes to security and GDPR?

To quote a customer -"Since I can't stop every breach from penetrating my critical assets, how do I get ready for GDPR and be confident in my ability to meet the criteria?  Particularly the 72-hour notification requirement."  

The first step we talk customers through is to implement some simple best practices: