As the opportunities waiting in the latest tech developments cast a bright light over the future in many parts of the industry, the security teams are finding deeper and stronger shadows brought into evidence by the same technologies. Happily, there are optimists in the security divisions who see these new tools as leading the way to better defenses than ever before.

Hossein Arefi, VP of Software Engineering at Fidelis Cybersecurity, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to during the HPE Big Data Conference to talk about shifts in the security provider mindset, expanding technological interactions and the need to avoid thinking of security as foolproof.

Starting up

Arefi gave a quick introduction of Fidelis: “Our mission is to protect the world’s most sensitive information. We do that whether it’s in government organizations or the commercial sector. … We’re not very well-known, but we are well-appreciated. Our core technology is based upon deep visibility and real-time analysis of data,” Arefi explained, describing Fidelis’ approach as “visibility first, in real-time, and then build on top of that.”

Facing reality

“What we’ve realized is that you can’t really catch everything all the time. You can try as hard as you can, [but] eventually you’ll fail,” Arefi stated. “I think accepting that fact is very important. … That was the realization that led to us using HP Vertica to store metadata about everything that happens in your network, to be able to go back and analyze it later.”

In taking on this mentality of recognizing vulnerabilities, Arefi said, “We have a comprehensive approach to network security … to really enhance the way you can take action once you’ve detected a problem. We think that we have a data advantage, where the data that we collect is so rich and so well-structured … we think that gives us an advantage over other companies.”

Future battles

“My belief is that [streaming analytics tools] will be a game-changer,” Arefi asserted, along with the idea that “we will have a dynamic shift in the capabilities of cyber-attackers versus cyber-defenders … in the defenders’ favor.”

As these developments will commonly rely on “utilizing a massive increase in computational power,” Arefi anticipates access being the prime separator between the offensive and defensive sides of security. “For various reasons, I don’t think that cyber-attackers have access to similar types of utilities [such as cloud spin-up of attacks],” he said

Arefi also speculated that “dark clouds,” basically a dark-web equivalent of commercial clouds, would not be at the scale of AWS or Microsoft Azure, but their presence would be something to consider in days to come. With all of these attacks making security compromise a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ Fidelis feels that its focus on shrinking the time of breach detection will show strong results.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Big Data Conference.

Photo by SiliconANGLE