Almost every company has a mission statement. Some companies make them public and a part of their marketing campaigns, tag lines, and actual products. Others keep their mission statements internal, almost like a prized position, and keep them for only training and hallway posters. One thing I have learned at eEye as the Product Manager, is to have my very own mission statement for day-to-day business and solution implementation.
My mission is simple: “Simplify Vulnerability Management”
One may ask why I choose something so generic and common place like a Dyson Vacuum cleaner statement. The answer is really simple in itself. When I started with eEye over seven years ago, vulnerability assessment, pen testing, and even the concept of vulnerabilities were somewhat of a dark art. This is well before regulatory compliance initiatives and standards like PCI and SCAP. Only things like BugTraq and CVEs really existed and many peers did not even believe that systems, networks, and applications could be compromised to the level they are today. Tools like Retina began to provide a distinct technical solution for security engineers to understand the problems and form a remediation strategy. As a technical tool, management and executives would generally get lost in the complexity of jargon, audits, policies, and even the scopes for performing an assessment.
In more recent years, the tools have evolved from a technical point solution to regulatory compliance solutions that businesses must adhere to for daily operations. Much of the technical edges have been simplified. It is my belief that they are still not simple enough. Users still have to know about audits, policies, address groups, and various other parameters just to meet assessment and business requirements. My personal goal for the solutions is to make the products as simple as a possible so virtually anyone can use them. No advanced security knowledge is needed. I believe the results should be as detailed as needed depending on the audience and allow all the data to be summarized for any executive or analyst who wants to know. I believe in keeping it simple yet granular when needed and not the reverse.
Therefore, as you begin to review the next generation unified vulnerability management solutions from eEye, please understand my personal mission statement when designing, building, and implementing our solutions. Make the product reliable, accurate, and simple to meet your business objectives. eEye has had a reliable and accurate product for years and we continue to simply the solution through research and new user interface (Retina CS) to make unified vulnerability management easier for everyone.
I believe in my mission statement. Does your personal mission statement focus on your career, security, vulnerabilities, or the regulatory compliance initiatives you are responsible for? Please let us know. We can help you achieve your goals.
Morey J. Haber, Chief Security Officer, BeyondTrust
Morey J. Haber is the Chief Security Officer at BeyondTrust. He has more than 25 years of IT industry experience and has authored three books: Privileged Attack Vectors, Asset Attack Vectors, and Identity Attack Vectors. He is a founding member of the industry group Transparency in Cyber, and in 2020 was elected to the Identity Defined Security Alliance (IDSA) Executive Advisory Board. Morey currently oversees BeyondTrust security and governance for corporate and cloud based solutions and regularly consults for global periodicals and media. He originally joined BeyondTrust in 2012 as a part of the eEye Digital Security acquisition where he served as a Product Owner and Solutions Engineer since 2004. Prior to eEye, he was Beta Development Manager for Computer Associates, Inc. He began his career as Reliability and Maintainability Engineer for a government contractor building flight and training simulators. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
