The Best Tool For The Job

One of the promises Bear promotes is the ability for a Trusted Provider to control the actual security vendors providing services to that provider’s customers and change out the vendors at any time with no impact to the customer.  We strongly feel that this is a new type of approach that really frees providers to enforce the rule most of them espouse – namely using the best option available and not being tied into one vendor.

Interestingly, this is one area that we have found a lot of resistance for two distinct reasons.  First, people do not understand what we are providing and consider us to be a vendor they are tied into.  Second, and more interestingly, these providers’ employees are tied into vendors whether or not the company wants to admit it.

On the first point, this is a fair criticism of a new approach and one that will eventually evolve into a new standard.  We are attempting to solve this problem by passing control over the Open Communications Platform to the providers themselves and empowering them to dictate how their provider network will operate.  Our hope is that a sufficient number of providers will use this platform, develop best practices and they will form the standard moving forward.  The Open Communications Platform is extremely malleable and can be tailored to meet a variety of corporate cultures, enterprise IT practices and be readily embedded into current provider efforts.

The second point, however, is exactly what Bear is fighting to break – the domination of security by obsolete products unable to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.  By removing the intrusive aspect of security from the enterprise and by moving from a product-oriented to a services-oriented approach, the intent is to leverage a larger range of potential providers.  Through the use of cybersecurity insurance policies making providers accountable for secure systems, the intent is to make each vendor accountable and to move into a highly-competitive security world where each vendor has to continually prove heir effectiveness to survive.

In order to make this latter point a reality, Bear is working to normalize reporting in order to make each vendor report on the same metrics in the same manner and to do so through a central platform interface.  This type of reporting will eliminate the apples-to-oranges defense and truly enable providers to effectively manage their vendors and, hopefully, remove the familiarity issues providers have with their employees and security products in the current market.

We feel that the Open Communications Platform enables a vendor-agnostic approach to protection that upholds the values that many providers attempt to uphold – find the best tools for the job.  We feel Bear take this one step further, however, by adding a time component – Find The Best Tools For The Job Today With No Business Disruption.