Robert Bobel is the Director of Product Management at NetWrix. In this interview he talks about change auditing trends, enterprise security issues, increasing IT complexity and the NetWrix Change Reporter Suite.

What change auditing trends can we expect to shape this year?

In 2013 organizations will have bigger budgets to be spent on Security in an attempt to bring the required detailed attention to fight Cyber Attacks. This is in direct response to the increasingly sophisticated exploits being uncovered and the breadth and scope of APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) become well understood.

Answering the “Who has access to What?” question will become fundamental as organizations cope with huge volumes of unstructured data and the legacy security protecting it.

Also, the policy based security will finally come to the masses as technologies like Microsoft’s Dynamic Access become available in the Windows operating system.

Furthermore, big data technologies will transform the IT security and auditing world beginning in 2013. As technologies and technique used to cope with big data go mainstream, the massive amount of existing security and audit data found on almost every corporate networks will become more transparent. Applying big data techniques will allow software companies to get better at finding critical elements and piecing them together to form a clear picture of the complex activities performed by employees, IT administrators and outsiders who want their data. Our own AuditArchive™ solution incorporates Big Data methods to allow customers to store and then analyze extremely large amounts of audit data; sometimes 6 to 7 years of data from mission critical systems.


Based on your discussions with clients, what information security issues are most common in the enterprise?

From my experience customers are looking for products that provide Security & Data Access Governance, as they realize that traditional SIEM (Security information & event log management) tools are often ineffective because they were designed a long time ago. Customers want the ability to understand the security settings for critical IT systems and then watch how that is changed over time.