Blue Coat and Dimension Data Team Up to Combat Evolving Cyberattacks

Blue Coat (News - Alert) recently announced that it will be combining efforts with Dimension Data to provide a web security solution as a global service by the first quarter of next year. It will combine the infrastructure of Blue Coat’s Cloud Generation Gateway with security services provided by Dimension Data (News - Alert), giving customers an easy-to-deploy security product requiring no special on-premises equipment.

Sunnyvale, California-based Blue Coat Systems, Inc. provides security for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Incident response, computer forensics, and malware analytics are also some of the services it provides. According to its website, its customer base includes 80 percent of the Global Fortune 500 companies

Johannesburg, South Africa-based Dimension Data offers various services in the cloud including data centers, contact centers, enterprise mobility, and infrastructure. It also provides managed services, support, and consulting.

The partnership between the companies comes at a time when cyberattacks grow more sophisticated. As Dark Reading contributor Vincent Weafer suggests, security technology must not only be able to protect against known threats, but prevent attacks in advance. He used the analogy of a hockey player that succeeds not by following the puck but by anticipating where it will be next.

The growing list of vulnerabilities is troubling at best. Although virtual machines allow scalability, they also provide openings for attacks. As a growing number of employees work from home, their systems will become targets.

Instead of attacking at the OS level, future attacks will seek to compromise at the firmware and hardware levels. Although news of the explosive growth of the IoT and predictions of as many as 50 billion connected devices by 2020 are exciting, cybercriminals will look to these devices for vulnerabilities too.

According to PropertyCasualty360.com, the average cost of legal fees for each security breach lawsuit is about $690,000 and can easily grow to the order of millions of dollars. That’s enough to put many SMBs out of business and does not include the cost of the compromised information itself, which is the real gold the cybercrooks are after.

Fortunately there are companies like Blue Coat and Dimension Data developing solutions to protect against these newer, more complex threats. Unfortunately for some companies, they cannot see past the short term cost of security against the long term cost of a devastating cyberattack that could put them out of business.