Gordon MacKay Chief Technology Officer Digital Defense

Digital Defense, Inc. (DDI), a global security risk assessment provider's new VDR offering refines data from a variety of assessment sources producing higher quality guidance to remediation teams to more efficiently address findings. Through integration via application programming interfaces, the VDR also provides more intelligent guidance to enforcement technologies to protect information assets on a more proactive basis.

“Preliminary findings from the VDR focus groups reflect a high level of interest from C-level security professionals, across multiple industries, surrounding various features. The high percent of respondents rating VDR as positive is a good indicator of market receptivity”

DDI, president & chief executive officer, Larry Hurtado states, “To thwart breaches by cybercriminals, we must do everything we can to seal security holes. VDR fills a typically overlooked gap in the information security space through the reconciliation and correlation of results from recurring security assessments from a variety of sources. VDR also provides chief information security officers with more time by providing more accurate assessment data from which to lock down their networks. In addition, VDR provides chief financial officers with much needed cost relief by reducing noise in Big Data security platforms; thereby lessening the computing resources necessary to keep them running.”

While a variety of assessment tools exist in the marketplace, these offerings struggle to keep track of network-deployed systems over time. There is also a high degree of inconsistency seen in the results of these tools many of which introduce extremely high false positive rates. VDR was developed in response to these industry challenges that result in diverting precious security analyst resources away from their primary mission: protecting the enterprise from cybercriminals. Even worse, cybercriminal knows these issues exist and is one of the reasons why they continue to be successful even though organizations are spending significant dollars to protect their information assets.

The Ponemon Institute was engaged to conduct an independent review of VDR technology. The initial findings reported include:

100% of respondents indicated strong levels of importance (66% very important; 34% important) associated with the capability for VDR to improve the accuracy of standalone security intelligence tools by importing data from complementary and overlapping data sources.
97% of research respondents positively rated the VDR design (76% very positive and 21% positive).
72% of respondents indicated high interest in implementation of the VDR technology within their organization
Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute speaks to the research, “Preliminary findings from the VDR focus groups reflect a high level of interest from C-level security professionals, across multiple industries, surrounding various features. The high percent of respondents rating VDR as positive is a good indicator of market receptivity”.

DDI’s executive vice president and chief technology officer Gordon MacKay conceived VDR and has been leading the company’s development of the solution, which is detailed in a recently released white paper. MacKay provides insight, “Bringing this technology to the market is extremely gratifying. It is my belief that VDR will make a significant impact in bolstering the security of organizations, while reducing overhead and expense. One of the most exciting aspects of the solution is the ability to import human risk assessments, a key factor in evaluating the risk posture of organizations”.

Further elaborating, MacKay says, “VDR dramatically increases efficiencies and accuracy in identifying true risk through the refinement of assessment data. Everyone is talking about Big Data. We’re showing everyone the power of “small data.” Mackay can be followed at http://blog.ddifrontline.com/165 . Twitter @gord_mackay

About Digital Defense

Founded in 1999, Digital Defense, Inc. (DDI) is a premier provider of managed security risk assessment solutions protecting billions in assets for small businesses to Fortune companies in over 65 countries. DDI’s dedicated team of experts helps organizations establish a culture of security through regular information security assessments, awareness education and decisive security intelligence. This proven method bolsters the capability of organizations to reduce risk and keep information, intellectual property and reputations secure. The combination of DDI’s certified security analysts, patent-pending scanning technology and proprietary cloud-based vulnerability management system, Frontline™ Solutions Platform, delivers one of the most powerful assessment results and remediation management solutions possible.