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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/idmanagement/0,3800011361,39158428,00.htm

VeriSign enterprise security tool comes to Europe
Predicts which vulnerabilities will affect your business...

By Graeme Wearden

Published: Thursday 27 April 2006

VeriSign has launched a service to help large European companies secure their networks and systems.

Secure Risk Profile Service (SRPS) was first unveiled in the US last month and is now available to companies across Europe. VeriSign said companies can use the product to work out exactly which vulnerabilities are a serious threat to their infrastructure. The service also allows companies to visualise the impact of a major change in the IT system - for example, through the acquisition of another company.

John Ferguson, VeriSign's director of product strategy, said: "Companies typically have separate teams for patching, change management and event monitoring. Because they're in different silos, individual teams can't have complete context about whether a vulnerability is an issue outside their remit, or in another part of the organisation."

Vulnerability management products, which tell companies when a new flaw affects their products, are commonplace today but Ferguson insisted SRPS offers more.

He said: "We have built network context on top of vulnerability management."

In practice, this means the product will understand how the various IT components within a company fit together. VeriSign says it can work out which vulnerabilities need to be patched on which systems by tracking how servers, applications and databases are interlinked.

Ferguson claimed the product could take 1,000 vulnerabilities and work out which 50 a company actually has to address.

SRPS will be offered as a managed service, at a price that varies depending on the size of a company's network. Ferguson suggested it could cost around $100,000 per year for a large company with up to 100 network assets to protect.

The service will be targeted at large companies and organisations, especially those in sectors such as finance and healthcare which have critical data that must be kept secure.

Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet UK