A new alliance between cybersecurity companies from across the U.S. aims to more tightly integrate their products and advance efforts to automate key security processes.
The initiative—dubbed the Automated Security Alliance Program, or ASAP—is led by a Boston-based startup, Hexadite. Its initial group of partners includes some big names in the cybersecurity world: Carbon Black, Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CHKP]]), CrowdStrike, Cybereason, Cylance, Exabeam, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: [[ticker:HPE]]), Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: [[ticker:PANW]]), and Securonix.
Hexadite’s software connects with clients’ existing threat detection systems and uses artificial intelligence technologies to automate and speed up the process of investigating and resolving cyber breach alerts, according to the company.
Two-year-old Hexadite says the new alliance formalizes its relationships with other cybersecurity vendors by strengthening the technical integrations between their products, sharing more data between their services, making future upgrades more seamless, and creating new marketing opportunities.
For customers using products from Hexadite and other alliance members, it should make their cyber defenses simpler, more efficient, and more effective, said Upesh Patel, CrowdStrike’s vice president of business and corporate development, in a press release.
Partnerships like ASAP are becoming more commonplace in cybersecurity, as the industry seeks ways to collaborate and unify customers’ security tools and strategies. Another example is the C³ Alliance, a group of cybersecurity, enterprise software, and other service providers who are adding to their products more security measures for so-called “privileged accounts.” That initiative, announced in April, is led by Newton, MA-based CyberArk Software (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CYBR]]).
ASAP also ties into another big theme in cybersecurity right now: efforts to use software to automate security operations, especially given that many companies’ security teams are short-handed these days, industry leaders say.
But some in the industry—like John Bruce, CEO of IBM-owned Resilient—would be skeptical that cybersecurity can be handled entirely by software, at least with current technologies. “I resist this term of ‘security automation,’” Bruce said at Xconomy’s “State of Cybersecurity” conference held last week. “I do believe you can automate parts of the processes.”
To be fair, Hexadite isn’t pitching its product as a silver bullet. Its goal is to use software to lighten the workload of security teams, so they can focus their energies on the largest and most complex threats.
“Security operations teams are drowning under alerts, and as a result, they’re getting burnt out and threats are slipping through the cracks,” said Eran Barak, Hexadite CEO and co-founder, in the press release. “For a number of reasons, there’s no way organizations can hire their way out of this predicament, so automation is the only answer.”
But “security automation can’t exist in a walled garden,” he continued. “Collaboration is essential and makes a combined defense greater than the sum of its parts, which is why ASAP is a significant step forward.”
