When it comes to enterprise software, support is so important.
That's why, right now, we're learning about trusted support.
What is it?
What are the components of support?
I'm Michael Krigsman.
I'm an industry analyst and the host of CXOTalk.
We're speaking with Brennan Baybeck, who is vice president of global IT Risk Management
at Oracle.
Hey, Brennan.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Tell us about what you do at Oracle.
I lead a global security risk management organization at Oracle.
We focus on security operations, security risk management, compliance, certifications
and attestation, and just general security topics as well.
Brennan, when we talk about support or trusted support, what do we mean?
What are we talking about?
Trusted support is a key component of a good IT governance structure.
Inside of trusted support, you would have things like patching, change management, ensuring
the integrity of updates and maintenance necessary, as well as other components that I look for
would be innovation and automation.
Security and governance are clearly core elements of this.
Definitely.
One of the things that's absolutely necessary is that we are keeping our systems up to date.
The threats and vulnerabilities that are occurring on a daily basis, they continue to increase.
It's a necessity to keep systems up to date, keep them patched, keep them maintained, properly
configured, and that's where the security comes into play.
You need security at every layer in the stack.
Correct.
These IT environments, enterprise-wide IT environments, are extremely complex.
They're made up of various components and pieces and parts, so as systems grow more
complex.
It used to be big enterprises that would only have to be worried about working with, you
know, trusted partners and partners that could handle their enterprise needs.
But it's extending into medium and small businesses as well now too because of the types of IT
environments that are being produced at these businesses.
It's interesting that cloud brings yet another level of complexity to this as well.
It does and, in those environments, you have to rely on partners, actually.
At that point, you don't have a choice.
If you have a SAS offering or you're using a SAS service, for example, the partner takes
care a lot of things for you.
Finding a partner that's doing good vulnerability management, has good change management, understand
their patching and how to address their vulnerabilities in their products, as well as providing good
visibility and reporting to you is extremely important.
The reporting is a crucial part.
It's definitely a crucial part.
The main reason is because, when you move to using cloud providers, you are relinquishing
some level of control, which requires more visibility and reporting and understanding
of what your provider, your trusted partner is doing.
Now, where does software patching fit into this equation?
Software patching fits into the operations management of an organization.
It's right alongside with configuration management, the asset inventory and, also, threat and
vulnerability management.
They all kind of fit together into a process that you do for ongoing software management.
This may be an obvious question, but what are the risks of not following the right software
patching protocols and governance?
If you don't have the right processes and protocols in for software management and good
governance over those processes, your business is going to be subjected to the threats and
vulnerabilities that are out there today.
It just takes one change inside the IT infrastructure to now open up the threat model and open up
a new threat vector that could potentially affect you.
What's the relation between security patching and source code?
If you don't have access to the source code and you don't understand the source code,
it's very difficult to protect against vulnerabilities to that source code.
Having a trusted support partner that obviously understands the source code or owns it, for
that matter, it's very important because they're the ones that understand all of the intricacies
of their products and giving you the tools, the technology, and the automation to patch
those effectively.
Do you have any advice that's specific for small and medium-sized companies who don't
have the budgets of the largest companies in the world?
For small and medium-size businesses, relying on your partners and your vendors is extremely
critical.
Now, with smaller and medium businesses aggressively moving to cloud services, you want to find
a partner that has the ability to do that along with you as well.
What advice have you got for large organizations who are looking at this?
Don't think you can do everything on your own.
Many large organizations, they were able to build these programs up over the last several
years.
But with their businesses aggressively moving to cloud technologies, rely on those partners
to help you with that instead of trying to do it all on your own.
Okay.
Brennan Baybeck, thank you so much.
Thank you.