Tripwire Product Enhancements Target Security, Business Needs

Tripwire, Inc. has rolled out a series of three product upgrades intended to help security professionals forge closer relationships between security investments and positive effects on their company's bottom line.

The new releases of Tripwire Enterprise, Tripwire Log Center and Tripwire VIA Data Mart are aimed at gathering information to help understand, assess and manage the organization's security posture and relative levels of risk in order to help C-level executives reach, and also validate, decisions around security technologies and budgets.

"We need to create a bridge between the business world and the IT security world," said Tripwire's product marketing director, Michael Thelander. "We've made a concerted effort to enable our systems to talk to one another, and to talk to other systems in the environment. This is about systems working together to take data points from different areas and bring them together into something useful."

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This objective is expected to be accomplished through the Portland-based company's ability to provide continuous monitoring and assessment in order to immediately detect deviations from the norm and be able to leverage this information to better understand the risk, the response and the effects upon business processes and management.

Tripwire Enterprise, Tripwire Log Center and Tripwire Data Mart now work more closely to provide security information at the level of the targeted audience.

"It is difficult to figure out budgeting until you understand what is happening at a strategic level," observed Thelander. "Our technologies align security controls to business concepts of priority, risk and importance while measuring the results in a rolled-up score in various reports that make sense to business leaders."

The system also integrates with Active Directory to obtain information on user entitlement, groups, roles and similar attributes useful in the detection of suspicious behavior.

NEXT: Tripwire Builds U.S. Channel Presence

The 14-year-old company primarily uses direct sales in the United States, but it's heavily indirect in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The company has also hired Alex Thurber, an industry veteran who has helped to customize channel strategies at both Cisco and McAfee toward more effective cooperation with the channel.

"We are in the process of building a stronger channel presence here in the United States," said Thurber, who now serves as vice president of worldwide sales at Tripwire. "I am going to continue to drive the direct sales force, but we will also take the channel successes that we have had in EMEA and operationalize this in a way that establishes a world-class global channel model that will role successfully into the United States. We are not going to get rid of our direct sales force, which has been very successful. But, we are going to be working with partners around the U.S. to help drive incremental value, not just from a product and solution perspective, but also from a service perspective and a presales perspective."

Thurber is still in the early stages of this initiative but says his previous experiences are expected to be instrumental in the process. "We will develop strong rules of engagement and enforce them," he said.

Tripwire started out 14 years ago with an open-source file integrity monitoring product. The company then moved heavily into PCI compliance before parlaying the data gathered by its systems into information security solutions.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 11, 2012