Privileged Identity Management News Line November 2010

Top of Mind

Lessons in IT Cost Cutting

Philip Lieberman, President & CEO, Lieberman Software

At a recent Chief Information Officers (CIO) conference for insurance industry executives, I gave a presentation on ways to improve the relationships between CIOs and their IT management.

At the end of the presentation I received exasperated responses from some of the CIOs; they told me there was little need to enhance these relationships since they had long ago outsourced much of their IT staff and there was effectively no “relationship” to improve.

In hindsight, ceding the US insurance industry’s IT operations to non-employees seems like an unavoidable outcome of a relentless push to lower costs. With their abandonment of in-house IT comes the loss of corporate knowledge, loyalty, and innovation; the industry also forfeits its ability to combine the CIO’s vision with the operational knowledge of internal IT staff to achieve competitive advantage.

The road to lackluster IT performance for America’s large insurance companies was paved by the greed and shortsightedness of their CEOs. Somehow these executives perceived IT as a commodity that can be reduced at will, with no ill effect on the company. Today many of these organizations have virtually no in-house IT employees, having outsourced much of their work offshore.

Now that they have abandoned in-house IT these former market leaders find themselves challenged by a new breed of competitors who exist primarily online, without the encumbrances of the brick-and-mortar insurance world. These new entrants have the vision to regard IT as a business weapon and are poised to show the big guys the folly of their ways.

Analysts at this insurance industry conference told us that the industry as it now exists– with its traditional agents, disperse sales offices and paper and pencil processes– will be dead within 15 years as the demands of Internet-savvy consumers come to dominate.

It’s sad to think that the CIOs of these former market leaders are now little more than hanging ornaments. Without the benefits of an engaged, full-time IT staff the CIOs who were once valued strategists are now little more than hatchet men tasked with reducing costs and tidying up the deck chairs – passing out new iPads to clueless executives as the Titanic slowly sinks.

What do you think? Email me at: phil@liebsoft.com.

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Events / Press / Analysts

InfoSec 2011. April 18 - 20, 2011. Orlando, FL. Visit us at Booth 308. Get 10% off your registration by using the code OS11/VDIS when registering!

Lieberman ramps up privileged identity push into cloud service providers. 451 Group. “Lieberman Software’s flagship product is Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM), which is designed for enterprise domain account management. The strength of the company’s technology lies in its ability to seek out and discover which passwords are in use at systems, services and operational tasks, integrate target resources into its framework, perform account event correlation at a back-end database and automate the propagation of randomly generated passwords to the target resource.” (Subscription required to read entire report.)

Security And The Cloud: Looking At The Opportunity Beyond The Obstacle. Forrester Research. “Lieberman Software has tailored its solutions to provide continuous monitoring of privileged user activity in cloud environments.” (Subscription required to read entire report.)

Banish Weak Passwords: Policies To Ensure Passwords Are Safe. Processor. Data center and IT managers should bear in mind that insider attacks are just as imminent as attacks from outside hackers, says Chris Stoneff, senior product manager at Lieberman Software. He suggests managers consider bringing in applications that automatically change passwords daily.

The Rising Threat Of Cyberterrorism: Between Data Loss & Downtime, Cyberterrorism Can Be Devastating. Processor. Lieberman says cyberterrorism continues to bubble below the surface, with no large-scale effort to quash it, because there hasn't yet been a major, defining attack. “Everyone is waiting for the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” says Lieberman. “Until Pearl Harbor happens, it’s [difficult] to move forward with any form of legislation that might deal with it.”

Rebates Get Channel Makeover. SearchITChannel.com. "Working closely with a vendor on a business plan is a new experience for some resellers. NetBR, a solution provider based in Sao Paolo, Brazil, last year became an authorized reseller of Lieberman Software's privileged identity management products. Andre Facciolli, chief technology officer at NetBR, said Lieberman is the first technology vendor he's worked with on a go-to-market plan."

Fixing Weak Passwords. Professional Security Magazine. Passwords have been with us since before the age of the desktop PC but, as Chris Stoneff, senior product manager with Lieberman Software writes, administrators and their users need to rethink their password security policies if they are to be truly effective.

Toolbox: New Products for IT Professionals. TechNet Magazine. How do you ensure that two processes that require the same resources aren't running at the same time? How can you make sure that you don’t overload a system by running too many concurrent tasks against service applications during the wee hours of the morning? One tool out there that helps you centralize your scheduled task management is Task Scheduler Pro from Lieberman Software.