Alrighty, it's only been 10 days since RSA, so what the heck, let's get the last two vendor reviews out the door, shall we? :) If I'd been smart, I would have talked about these two vendors in my earlier wrap-up post, but apparently my brain was on vacation that day. :)
First up we have Solera Networks... if you've followed my blog at all, you know that I'm a fan of NetWitness (see here)... Solera is very similar, with the exception of being more of a software solution than a hardware appliance. More importantly, they differentiate themselves from NetWitness by having a a VMWare Virtual Appliance that can be used to capture vSwitch traffic for full analysis.
Solera further differentiates itself from NetWitness in speed, confirmed at 8.1Gbps sustained, with bursts up to 10Gbps. They're able to handle 1Gbps in the software alone, which is fairly remarkable (that has to be one tight stack). Solera also has an API (SOAP/REST) that can be used for integration with other tools. And, lastly, their software generates PCAPs on the fly based on raw data. You might think that this would be incredibly slow, but you would be wrong. :) Thanks to a proprietary file system, they're able to quickly rip out a PCAP when needed.
A special "thank you" to Solera Networks President and CEO Steve Shillingford for taking the time to chat with me about this interesting product. Hat tip to Lauren Dresnick of New Venture Communications for coordinating the meeting.
The last product I wanted to bring to your attention was one of the Innovation Sandbox finalists, Yubico, makers of YubiKey. This little USB device is really quite interesting, and for once it's a strong auth product aimed at the consumer space. Check out their long list of integrated applications to see just how much use you can make of the device. In a nutshell, by installing and touching the hot spot on the key, it will go out to their web site, securely authenticate, grab strong credentials, and then automatically populate them into the supported application.
My only major concern with YubiKey is that, being a SaaS styled solution, network loss could have a detrimental effect on its use. However, integrated with OpenID and OATH, this could really be an interesting tool going forward that could provide a viable alternative to manually entered passwords.
And thus concludes RSA vendor reviews. Thanks for playing. Have a nice day. :)
