Easy to integrate. Scalable. User-friendly, robust and feature-rich. These are the words every business owner wants to hear when evaluating digital security solutions. Unfortunately, most providers offer products and services that fail to live up to that description.
Not so RSA. A Dell Technologies company, RSA offers business-driven security solutions that are exactly that. The company’s suite of services helps organizations grow and thrive despite ever-increasing and evolving digital risk. RewardExpert sat down with Peter Beardmore, director of digital risk solutions and RSA spokesperson, to learn more.
Built by Pioneers in Secure Communication
Director of Digital Risk Solutions
at RSA
“The original RSA encryption algorithm was written in 1977 by three PhD cryptographers named Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman,” Beardmore explained. “Their original paper laid out plans to help facilitate secure communications over networks and ultimately became the underpinnings for virtually all of the secure communications that happen on the Internet today.”
RSA became a company in 1982 and focused primarily on encryption based on the original algorithm as well as additional technology that had developed from it.
“While the patents have long since expired,” Beardmore added, “over the years RSA has evolved into one of the preeminent brands in digital risk management, which is really about helping organizations ensure their risk is properly seen, understood, mitigated and acted upon.”
Today, RSA protects millions of users around the world, including 94 percent of Fortune 500 companies. “We literally protect over a billion consumer identities,” Beardmore says, “and the scale of our organization and effect on people’s lives is tremendous.”
Managing Traditional and Unanticipated Risks
In today’s increasingly digital business environment, companies are regularly exposed to risk.
“Organizations are increasingly connected to customers, employees, partners and the world in general through connected devices, the Internet and financial transactions,” Beardmore explained. “Oftentimes there are unanticipated and invisible risks that are only recognized when bad things start to occur. Then, when the organization is unprepared, those bad things can get a whole lot worse.”
He noted that one of the biggest often unanticipated risks is increasing use of the cloud.
“More organizations are using cloud-based services or moving their existing network infrastructure to the cloud because, at least theoretically, it’s cheaper, more secure, and easier to run, update and manage,” Beardmore continued. “But in doing so, new risks emerge. Organizations are beginning to realize that their old risk management infrastructure is outdated because of all this additional connectivity. They want to focus in on areas that can have the greatest impact on improving security in the shortest amount of time.”
Fortunately, RSA can help.
“We help organizations focus on areas such as cyber risk or managing the risks of their workforce and how they’re connecting, how they’re authenticating themselves, their access privileges, third party risks, cloud-related risks and compliance resiliency,” Beardmore said. “These are all areas in which we can help organizations evolve their risk management so that they are more prepared and can find greater success in digital initiatives.”
A Complete Portfolio of Security Solutions
Beardmore said RSA offers its customers a complete portfolio of security solutions for the management of digital risk.
“Integrated risk management includes all of the digital elements I mentioned earlier,” he explained. “We’ve taken the RSA Archer Suite, which originated in the world of governance risk and compliance, and tightly integrated it with the RSA NetWitness Platform to create the type of system that many security operation centers in large corporations and governments use to detect and ultimately treat cyber intrusions into their network. The RSA NetWitness Platform has all of the tools you need to be able to do that, including the investigation process, if something bad were to occur.”
While Beardmore noted that security operations and risk management often live within different silos in an organization, he said that RSA is focused on using its solutions to bring those functions together so that each segment of the organization understands all associated risks.
“This brings us to identity,” he continued. “Today, over 80 percent of cyber breaches still involve some sort of compromise of credentials. The reality is that people are still using bad usernames and passwords, so we’ve created a better way to authenticate users that is easy enough to use that it won’t prevent access but will ensure that people are who they say they are and have access to the right assets in a network that they should have access to. That’s not only relevant for users like employers or partners but also for customers and consumers.”
To that end RSA offers the RSA SecurID Suite. “And we also have a suite of products and services called the RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence Suite, which is the technologies and services that help the banking, retail and ecommerce industries detect fraud and protect consumer identities,” Beardmore said.
A Valuable Investment
Beardmore said that RSA’s customers often see financial benefits when switching to the company’s suite of solutions because they no longer have to rely on individual tools to do their jobs.
“Many organizations have invested in dozens of different tools, but they’re only using a few of them on a day-to-day basis,” he continued. “This is because they’re not getting value out of these standalone tools. They will find value in the collective power of the RSA portfolio.”
Beardmore also noted that RSA’s customers can capitalize on that value quickly.
“We’ve architected our products to really focus in on specific use cases that are designed to address the immediate security needs of the organization,” he said. “And we include training. RSA University and our other customer enablement offerings are singularly focused on making sure that our customers get the most out of that investment.”