Entries Tagged "Resilient Systems"

Page 1 of 1

I'm Leaving IBM

Today is my last day at IBM.

If you’ve been following along, IBM bought my startup Resilient Systems in Spring 2016. Since then, I have been with IBM, holding the nicely ambiguous title of “Special Advisor.” As of the end of the month, I will be back on my own.

I will continue to write and speak, and do the occasional consulting job. I will continue to teach at the Harvard Kennedy School. I will continue to serve on boards for organizations I believe in: EFF, Access Now, Tor, EPIC, Verified Voting. And I will increasingly be an advocate for public-interest technology.

Posted on June 28, 2019 at 2:04 PMView Comments

IBM Officially Owns Resilient Systems

It’s officially final; IBM has “completed the acquisition” of Resilient Systems, Inc. We are now “Resilient, an IBM Company.”

As I expected when I announced this acquisition, I am staying on as the CTO of Resilient and something like Senior Advisor to IBM Security—we’re still working on the exact title. Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that this will be a good home for me. They know what they’re getting, and they’re still keeping me on. I have no intention of changing what I write about or speak about—or to whom.

For the company, this is still a great deal. The acquisition was big news at the RSA Conference a month ago, and we’ve gotten nothing but a positive response from analysts and a primarily positive response from customers.

Here’s a video of Resilient CEO John Bruce talking with IBM Security General Manager Marc van Zadelhoff about the acquisition. And here’s an analyst talking about the acquisition.

Posted on April 6, 2016 at 12:47 PMView Comments

Resilient Systems News: IBM to Buy Resilient Systems

Today, IBM announced its intention to purchase my company, Resilient Systems. (Yes, the rumors were basically true.)

I think this is a great development for Resilient Systems and its incident-response platform. (I know, but that’s what analysts are calling it.) IBM is an ideal partner for Resilient, and one that I have been quietly hoping would acquire it for over a year now. IBM has a unique combination of security products and services, and an existing organization that will help Resilient immeasurably. It’s a good match.

Last year, Resilient integrated with IBM’s SIEM—that’s Security Event and Incident Management—system, QRadar. My guess is that’s what attracted IBM to us in the first place. Resilient has the platform that makes QRadar actionable. Conversely, QRadar makes Resilient’s platform more powerful. The products are each good separately, but really good together.

And to IBM’s credit, it understood that its customers have all sorts of protection and detection security products—both IBM’s and others—and no single response hub to make sense of it all. This is what Resilient does extremely well, and can now do for IBM’s customers globally.

IBM is one of the largest enterprise security companies in the world. That’s not obvious; the 6,500-person IBM Security organization gets lost in the 390,000-person company. It has $2 billion in annual sales. It has a great reputation with both customers and analysts. And while Resilient is the industry leader in its field and has a great reputation, large companies like to buy from other large companies. Resilient has repeatedly sold to large enterprise customers, but it always takes some convincing. Being part of IBM makes it a safe choice. IBM also has a sales and service force that will allow Resilient to scale quickly. The company could have done it on its own eventually, but it would have taken many years.

It’s a sad reality in tech is that too often—once, unfortunately, in my personal experience—acquisitions don’t work out for either the acquirer or the acquiree. Deals are made in optimism, but the reality is much less rosy.

I don’t think that will happen here. As an acquirer, IBM has a history of effectively integrating the teams and the technologies it acquires. It has bought something like 15 security companies in the past decade—five in the past two years alone—and has (more or less) successfully integrated all of them. It carefully selects the companies it buys, spending a lot of time making sure the integration is successful. I was stunned by the amount of work the people from IBM did over the past two months, analyzing every nook and cranny of Resilient in detail: both to verify what they were buying and to figure out how to successfully integrate it.

IBM is going through a lot of reorganizing right now, but security is one of its big bets. It’s the fastest-growing vendor in the industry. It hired 1,000 security people in 2015. It needs to continue to grow, and Resilient is now a part of that growth.

Finally, IBM is an East Coast company. This may seem like a trivial point, but Resilient Systems is very much a product of the Boston area. I didn’t want Resilient to be a far-flung satellite of a Silicon Valley company. IBM Security is also headquartered in Cambridge, just five T stops away. That’s way better than a seven-hour no-legroom bad-food transcontinental flight away.

Random aside: this will be the third company I will have worked for whose name is no longer an acronym for its longer, original, name.

When I joined Resilient Systems just over two years ago, I assumed that it would eventually be purchased by a large and diversified company. Acquisitions in the security space are hot right now, and I have long believed that security will be subsumed by more general IT services. Surveying the field, IBM was always at the top of my list. Resilient had several suitors who expressed interest in purchasing it, as well as many investors who wanted to put money into the company. This was our best option.

We’re still working out what I’ll be doing at IBM; these months focused more on the company than on me personally. I know they want me to be involved in all of IBM Security. The people I’ll be working with know I’ll continue to blog and write books. (They also know that my website is way more popular than theirs.) They know I’ll continue to talk about politically sensitive topics. They know they won’t be able to edit or constrain my writings and speaking. At least, they say they know it; we’ll see what actually happens. But I’m optimistic. There are other IBM people whose public writings do not represent the views of IBM—so there’s precedent.

All in all, this is great news for Resilient Systems and—I hope—great news for IBM. We’re still exhibiting at the RSA Conference. I’m still serving a curated cocktail at the booth (#1727, South Hall) on Tuesday from 4:00-6:00. We’re still giving away signed copies of Data and Goliath. I’m not sure what sort of new signage we’ll have. No one liked my idea of a large spray-painted “Under New Management” sign nailed to the side of the booth, but I’m still lobbying for that.

EDITED TO ADD (3/17): This is how IBM is positioning us, at least initially.

Posted on February 29, 2016 at 11:08 AMView Comments

Resilient Systems News

Former Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson has joined our board of directors.

For those who don’t know, Resilient Systems is my company. I’m the CTO, and we sell an incident-response management platform that…well…helps IR teams to manage incidents. It’s a single hub that allows a team to collect data about an incident, assign and manage tasks, automate actions, integrate intelligence information, and so on. It’s designed to be powerful, flexible, and intuitive—if your HR or legal person needs to get involved, she has to be able to use it without any training. I’m really impressed with how well it works. Incident response is all about people, and the platform makes teams more effective. This is probably the best description of what we do.

We have lots of large- and medium-sized companies as customers. They’re all happy, and we continue to sell this thing at an impressive rate. Our Q3 numbers were fantastic. It’s kind of scary, really.

Posted on October 2, 2015 at 2:06 PMView Comments

Co3 Systems Changes Its Name to Resilient Systems

Today my company, Co3 Systems, is changing its name to Resilient Systems. The new name better reflects who we are and what we do. Plus, the old name was kind of dumb.

I have long liked the term “resilience.” If you look around, you’ll see it a lot. It’s used in human psychology, in organizational theory, in disaster recovery, in ecological systems, in materials science, and in systems engineering. Here’s a definition from 1991, in a book by Aaron Wildavsky called Searching for Safety: “Resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back.”

The concept of resilience has been used in IT systems for a long time.

I have been talking about resilience in IT security—and security in general—for at least 15 years. I gave a talk at an ICANN meeting in 2001 titled “Resilient Security and the Internet.” At the 2001 Black Hat, I said: “Strong countermeasures combine protection, detection, and response. The way to build resilient security is with vigilant, adaptive, relentless defense by experts (people, not products). There are no magic preventive countermeasures against crime in the real world, yet we are all reasonably safe, nevertheless. We need to bring that same thinking to the Internet.”

In Beyond Fear (2003), I spend pages on resilience: “Good security systems are resilient. They can withstand failures; a single failure doesn’t cause a cascade of other failures. They can withstand attacks, including attackers who cheat. They can withstand new advances in technology. They can fail and recover from failure.” We can defend against some attacks, but we have to detect and respond to the rest of them. That process is how we achieve resilience. It was true fifteen years ago and, if anything, it is even more true today.

So that’s the new name, Resilient Systems. We provide an Incident Response Platform, empowering organizations to thrive in the face of cyberattacks and business crises. Our collaborative platform arms incident response teams with workflows, intelligence, and deep-data analytics to react faster, coordinate better, and respond smarter.

And that’s the deal. Our Incident Response Platform produces and manages instant incident response plans. Together with our Security and Privacy modules, it provides IR teams with best-practice action plans and flexible workflows. It’s also agile, allowing teams to modify their response to suit organizational needs, and continues to adapt in real time as incidents evolve.

Resilience is a lot bigger than IT. It’s a lot bigger than technology. In my latest book, Data and Goliath, I write: “I am advocating for several flavors of resilience for both our systems of surveillance and our systems that control surveillance: resilience to hardware and software failure, resilience to technological innovation, resilience to political change, and resilience to coercion. An architecture of security provides resilience to changing political whims that might legitimize political surveillance. Multiple overlapping authorities provide resilience to coercive pressures. Properly written laws provide resilience to changing technological capabilities. Liberty provides resilience to authoritarianism. Of course, full resilience against any of these things, let alone all of them, is impossible. But we must do as well as we can, even to the point of assuming imperfections in our resilience.”

I wrote those words before we even considered a name change.

Same company, new name (and new website). Check us out.

Posted on February 17, 2015 at 6:53 AMView Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.