Siemens AG subsidiary Siemens Information and Communication Networks Inc. next week will outline its plan to marry physical security and network/information security in a wide-ranging initiative.
The Boca Raton, Fla.-based Siemens ICN unit on Monday will debut its HiPath Sicurity Solutions portfolio of products and services geared toward network and application-level security for IP networks. The portfolio includes consulting services, risk-assessment and management tools, network and system security, smart card-based access control and digital signatures as well as provisioning and identity management with Siemens HiPath MetaDirectory tools.
“Were looking at it from across the Siemens operating companies. This is about a holistic approach to support customers from early assessment through design, implementation and operation,” said Chris Meaney, director of secure networks for Siemens Enterprise Networks, in Atlanta.
Other Siemens units provide physical security systems to control access into sensitive areas, CATV monitoring, tracking of hard assets as they move around an enterprise, and facial recognition technology.
The five building blocks in the HiPath Sicurity Solutions offering include identity management; IP-based security including firewalls, intrusion detection systems and VPN; consulting and design services; mobile security and smart card infrastructure.
Many of those building blocks are “best of breed” offerings from third-party providers. Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. is supplying firewall, VPN and Quality of Service software; Nokia is providing hardened firewall appliances; Bell ID B.V. is providing smart card management software; Entrust is supplying PKI and single sign-on technologies; and Gemplus S.A. is providing smart card hardware.
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What Siemens ICN brings to the table is a smart card operating system and identity management tools based on its Lightweight Directory Access Protocol-based MetaDirectory products, which can be used to create a single directory that other subsystems can read from and synchronize with, according to Meaney.
Siemens ICN combined its HiPath MetaDirectory with smart card products to provide an identity management system for electronic transactions. Siemens will also leverage smart card technology to create a digital-signature product to allow enterprises to digitally sign and encypt electronic messages and other electronic documents to make them legally binding.
These new offerings, packaged into the new portfolio, are just the beginning in Siemens ICNs security initiative. “We intend over time to marry event correlation—physical security breaches with IT network security breaches. We see a tremendous uptick over time of this notion of IT and physical security interwoven and managed together,” said Meaney.
Siemens ICN will also offer managed security services from a new network operations center its building in Irving, Texas, that will provide management of customer VPNs, firewalls and intrusion detection systems, including monitoring, performance management, configuration management and patch release updates.
Siemens is targeting midsized enterprises that dont have the security expertise or resources to develop such expertise with the new portfolio. If priced right, that market represents a “greenfield” market opportunity,” Meaney said.
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