One of the less glamorous aspects of networking is the security side of things, despite the vital role it plays in keeping all the other data running smoothly. At ServiceNow’s Knowledge16 conference, ServiceNow, Inc. is attempting to put some of the spotlight on this integral service and make attendees more aware of its part in their enterprises.

Allan Leinwand, CTO at ServiceNow, met with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about some of the security challenges he’s encountered, how the spread of the cloud is changing things and what he sees as the best responses to security compromises.

Scaling and growth

Big topics early on in the conversation addressed expansion of the cloud while educating people about it, as well as the expansion of infrastructure and operations teams. Leinwand addressed the broadening of cloud’s space within government realms with the improvement of federal compliance standards, but didn’t put too much stress on accelerating this sector, feeling that it would mature at its own pace.

“There’s always challenges when you scale up operations and infrastructure,” he said. “It’s one of those things where you don’t know how to do it until you do it.”

Looking to the public side of cloud engagement, Leinwand noted, “We’re seeing our customers put more data in the cloud, run more operations, more apps, and all that means we need to think about how to scale.”

Securing the space

“Our customers’ data, we treat it like our own,” Leinwand stated. “So we give them a lot of functionality … to make it as secure as we can. … I’m hoping over time that as we prove and gain trust … that [security worries] will become less of a problem.”

With international data management bringing up concerns of “making sure that the data is sovereign within its environment,” and worries about the “Snowden effect,” ServiceNow has provided its customers with encryption on-prem before data arrives at the cloud, meaning that if a government demand for the data were to be issued, ServiceNow would be completely unable to turn it over in a usable form. Just by addressing international data governance standards compliance, ServiceNow has drawn in security specialists who were wary about the issue.

Fire drills and event response

“What you want to be able to do is have a process,” Leinwand said, similar to a fire drill, in which the chain of events responding to a security compromise is clearly laid out ahead of time and practiced thoroughly. He noted that for best response and preparation implementation, the CSO and CIO planning of response practices would need to be shared with ServiceNow, but that the main things for a CXO to take to the board when discussing security were: “What is their security incident response plan? … Have they tested it? [And] the second thing is … do they understand the attack surface of their company?”

Leinward continued: “The data that they can use to respond to the attacks is something we can help them manage.” But he also felt, “The key in all these events … is actually not that they’ve even occurred, but how you respond to the event, and what you learn from it … being able to forensically analyze the data, make sure you have the right collection … the harder thing that I think people haven’t internalized is ‘Am I tracking the right data?’”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge16.

Photo by SiliconANGLE