Radware CEO says networks must be immunized high up the stack

Roy Zisapel, co-founder of Radware, has served as its president and chief executive officer and a director since inception. Radware sells application switching hardware and software that manage network traffic.

From February 1996 to March 1997, Zisapel was a team leader of research and development projects for RND Networks. He has a B.Sc. degree in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University. Brian McKenna spoke to him at the end of 2006 for Infosecurity magazine about how he sees the network security market.

We published an analytical profile on Radware last year, in the July-August 2005 issue of Infosecurity (‘Radware’s Knight’s Move’, pp. 30-32). This argued that as the application switching market was consolidating, and smaller niche players were being bought up by Cisco and Juniper, you were morphing into security. Give me a sense of how 2006 has gone for you and what you are looking to do in 2007.

So what do we do in concept? What’s the mission of our company? We want to allow you to deliver applications over the network in the best possible way, and this is coming from the fact that today networks are non-intelligent; they don’t understand applications, they don’t understand your business. If you look at a bank, a hospital, an online business, they’re all using the same network, all the same equipment, even the same catalogue numbers, so they have the same system of switches, they have the same service although their business is very different, although the applications they are running are very different, although the requirements, regulations, compliance, security whatever of those applications running on the network are very different.

What it means is that today the networks are incapable of helping you, delivering the applications beyond just being a pipe, or connecting people to applications. Our idea is we want to make the network application smart, or, at the next level, even business smart; understand the applications and within the next year or 2 and later on even understand the business processes and support them in a manner that will, we believe, improve considerably the way that people are using their applications, managing their applications. That’s the concept behind the company.

How is your customer base evolving — what have your customers been saying in 2006?

We’re seeing new requirements both at the enterprise level and at the carrier level. Carriers are now starting to deliver many more applications over the network. The days that carriers treated themselves as a transit only are over. It’s now everything about more applications for the consumers, more services for the enterprises. That is changing the carrier world in a sense because as they deliver more applications, they are also more vulnerable to attacks and a whole new set of attacks, or a whole new set of security requirements are coming into play from using more Voice over IP, streaming, messaging, and so on. Also people are now using web protocols and SIP together to create the next generation of applications. So if I’m running a new call centre, beyond just adding a web interface to my CRM system, I want to be able for my customers to talk to my agents, I want at the same time maybe to stream to them a video on how to use the product.

And that puts a lot of new requirements that were not there before on the whole family of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) — SIP vulnerabilities, SIP based attacks etc.

Everything is web based now — the world is consolidating all the protocols, all the applications, including enterprise applications over the web. So now I need to go deeper in security to look inside the web protocol to say, “ah, you’re trying to use ERP, he’s trying to use CRM, I’m just web surfing”. So we’re seeing that movement in the security area towards more application and business related information. That’s why we’re investing more in IPS, in web application firewalling, in XML firewalling, because we’re seeing the demands going there.

So would simply advise not going to Voice over IP?

No, you cannot stop technology, you cannot stop the progress; you need the right tools, just to be secure. Let’s take the following analogy: today if I’m sick I can go to the doctor, the doctor diagnoses me, gives me a pill that matches exactly my sickness, my disease whatever and I take that and I kill myself. That’s exactly the signature approach of an IPS; you have a problem, you’ll get from your database, there will be a match for the signatures, I’ll clean your network. But our body’s much smarter than that; we have a self immune system. A lot of the viruses of the world we protect by ourselves. Only if it’s very specific, then we go to the doctor. Now people without self immune system, always a problematic one, like unfortunately HIV carriers, their life quality is miserable and probably their life will end much faster than others. Today, our network is running without self immune system. There is nothing in our network that automatically learns about attacks and is able to block them. So we’re looking at the behaviour of technology as the self immune system and we complement that with a signature based for very specific threads and styles. We think that combination is incredibly strong.

Okay, so you’re saying that you’re actually delivering on this metaphor? But it is quite a common metaphor. Cisco talks about a self defending network all the time.

But they’re not thinking about self defending networks. What self defending network for Cisco is, is the following, you’re deploying that on all your laptops. The anti-viral software will find the virus and then from the desktop I will configure the switches to block that user and that’s fine, but we think it’s an upside down approach; you don’t let the desktops control the core, you want the core to be protected; that’s number one. Cisco’s approach to a self defending network is more towards the edge of the enterprise network, being intelligent enough to fit the network. We think two things about it: first, let’s start with the core of the network rather than the desktop, or at least it’s complementary, because you can do both, at least. And number two, we believe that there should be great attention to denial of service application protection, XML protection, beyond only anti-virus at the edge or personal firewalls at the edge.

Do you find that your customers struggle with all the disparate, different technologies they have to manage? Isn’t that a problem for a company like yourself, which is very niche?

No, for the customers that we are targeting, that’s an advantage and I’ll give you an example. What do we do here? We’re a specialist, we’re a boutique for application delivery, to make your mission critical applications work; that’s our boutique. We’re not a supermarket for networking, we’re not a retail shop, we’re a boutique for application networking.

Now, our assumption is that your mission critical applications are really critical for your business, that’s an assumption, it’s not true for all customers, for instance, a small law firm, it doesn’t matter if for one hour the systems are not working, in any case, I don’t know, it’s lunch time and the lawyers are going to lunch and it is not that hard on the business, but for the New York stock exchange, for every second that the systems are down that’s a big hit, for Bloomberg, for Cingular Wireless; those are our customers.

The last time one of our journalists spoke to Radware, US growth seemed to be a major imperative. Are you meeting with any success there?

We are increasing, but we still want to increase much more. So yes, business is increasing but not to the level that we want. We want again a much stronger growth.

What’s your competition when you face that market?

It depends on customers, but we can find ourselves competing with Cisco on our load balancing deals, we might compete with Tipping Point for an IPS deal and so on. But I think today the issue is not about competition but we need to deliver and execute on our vision. If we do that correctly, we’ll grow.