SAN JOSE, Calif.: Brocade has further extended its worldwide technology leadership by promoting Curt Beckmann to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Previously Principal Architect, in this new role Beckmann will be responsible for leading the company's technology strategy and product roadmap within the region, aligning technology initiatives and execution closely with customer needs.
Beckmann, with almost two decades’ networking expertise, will also continue in his role as a leader in the Open Networking Foundation where he serves as chair of the Forwarding Abstractions Working Group. In this role he works closely with the world’s leading experts on SDN and the OpenFlow Standard to advance software defined networking (SDN) concepts, frameworks, architecture, and standards.
Beckmann entered networking as a hardware architect at Bay Networks (later Nortel Networks) in 1995, developing customized chipsets for Ethernet switching and early Layer 3 gigabit switches. He moved on to manage and architect Fibre Channel storage virtualization and iSCSI/FCIP protocol-conversion system-on-a-chip ASIC designs as a member of the founding team at Rhapsody Networks, which was acquired by Brocade in 2003. He spent some years in product management before returning to engineering, where he focused on enhancing the OpenFlow Standard to accelerate hardware adoption of new features.
"We’re already seeing customers in EMEA laying the foundations for SDN deployment in their data centers, to enable business growth and innovation," said Marcus Jewell, vice president EMEA at Brocade. "Curt is an industry veteran with the vision to help customers and partners understand how they can transform their existing networks. We are delighted to welcome him to the EMEA team."
According to Gartner, EMEA infrastructure spending in 2014 will be driven by data center modernization efforts and new data centers projects undertaken by both local and international companies.* In response to this customer requirement, key areas of focus for Beckmann will be network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN).
"Brocade is in a unique position to capture historic industry shifts and opportunities in software networking given its strong support of open networking standards and proven leadership in Ethernet fabrics," said Curt Beckmann. "I am thrilled to be joining the EMEA organization at such a pivotal time to be able to help our local customers and partners realize the benefits of this new network paradigm. The Brocade approach will help enterprises and service providers simplify the transition of their networks to drive new levels of business transformation."
Beckmann will be based in Paris, France, and report directly to Brocade vice president for EMEA, Marcus Jewell.
Increasingly Sophisticated Malware and Lack of Threat Intelligence are Key Factors in Growing Number of Successful Attacks: Check Point Survey
33% said a malware attack cost on average between £10,000 and £50,000 to remediate, highlighting need for greater threat intelligence when securing IT networks.
Embargoed, 8am 18th June 2014 – Check Point Software Technologies (Nasdaq: CHKP), the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, has today announced the findings of a survey showing that a combination of progressively more sophisticated malware and lack of intelligence about new security threats are key reasons for the growing number of successful malware attacks.
The gap between attack sophistication and available threat intelligence meant 31% of respondents said their organisation had suffered up to 20 successful attacks in the past 12 months - while 34% were unable to say exactly how many they had fallen victim to.
According to the survey of 140 UK IT and infosecurity professionals, the growing number of successful malware attacks is having a damaging impact upon business, in terms of both time spent and costs incurred when restoring and fixing systems after an attack. 28% of respondents stated that, on average, it took up to 10 days of IT staff time to remediate issues caused by a single attack. 33% said a malware attack cost on average between £10,000 and £50,000 to remediate.
These most recent findings further emphasise the growing challenge businesses face in tackling attacks from new, unknown malware, which were highlighted in Check Point’s 2014 Security Report published in May this year. The report, based on analysis of monitored security events from over 10,000 organisations worldwide across a range of industry sectors, found that 33% of organisations had downloaded infected files with unknown malware between June and December 2013.
Keith Bird, UK managing director for Check Point said: “It is becoming evident that there’s a widening gap between the developing sophistication of malware, and intelligence available on new threats to help block attacks. To cut the risks of exposure to external attacks, and to stop threats spreading, companies should enforce multiple threat prevention layers, including threat emulation or ‘sandboxing,’ and also look to use a range of real-time threat intelligence feeds to update their security solutions and help automatically prevent attacks.
Only by adopting this kind of holistic approach will organisations start to see a decline in successful malware attacks and the resultant costs, in terms of time and money, in remedying the issues that these create.”
Survey respondents highlighted a number of factors contributing to malware attacks being more successful, including: more zero-day exploits that weren’t detected by anti-virus solutions (15%); a lack of useful intelligence about new threats (14%); and smarter social engineering tactics by malware authors that tricked users (12%).
Check Point recently launched its new Threat Cloud IntelliStore, a unique threat intelligence marketplace that enables organizations to select intelligence feeds that will automatically prevent cyber-attacks. It builds upon Check Point’s core security intelligence infrastructure: ThreatCloud™ - the first collaborative security infrastructure to fight cybercrime. ThreatCloud dynamically delivers real-time threat intelligence derived from Check Point research, global data sensors, industry feeds and specialised intelligence feeds from the ThreatCloud IntelliStore.
The Check Point survey gauged the opinions of 140 IT and infosecurity professionals across a range of UK companies from the public and private sectors.