As the executive in charge of Check Point's product development, can you share with us some of your solutions coming to market?
We continue to work to make security upgradeable within a consistent framework. We will focus on an upgradeable posture against attacks, better ways to enforce access policies—everything from application policies to networking policies (including new program advisories to update which applications are allowed to run). We will continue to work on the ability to integrate server capabilities with the endpoints and to provide a choice of enforcement points. We will allow our customers to differentiate policies between different agents, whether they are wireless, VoIP, etc.
In which areas do you see the most new product development taking place?
There are newer markets for us—like internal and Web security—and our roadmap skews toward those areas. One of the new initiatives is Eventia, which provides integrated analysis of all security events, across all components of the network. The movement in security event management is toward mitigation, which is an obvious play for Check Point. We also focus on content and how to protect it. Once we identify a risk we can block it (like we always have) but one new challenge is to provide additional dynamic response methods. One of these methods is "quarantine"—if an end-user has malware, but is not using it intentionally, we want to help the helpdesk resolve the problem and not just block the attack. We refer to this as our auto-remediation feature.
Auto-remediation is part of informing end-users why they are blocked and what they can do to resolve the problem. We also have advisories on the Web that can help users clean up their computers.
Can you tell us about your R&D organization?
Our R&D organization is growing—we are hiring in San Francisco and Israel. Roughly one-third of our company is dedicated to R&D. We call it our product organization—as opposed to R&D—because we bring products to market and don't merely do research.
What has made Check Point so successful?
We are so successful because of our focus on security. This is not as trivial as it sounds. In everything we do, we have focused on security as the value that we add. For instance, we don't offer a VPN, but rather, a secure VPN.
Also, our focus on software has been very important. Over the years there has been pressure to get into hardware and other efforts, but we have resisted those pressures. Software enables our flexibility to address security threats. We leverage partnerships for the things that fall outside of our focus area of software.
Openness is another attribute that has contributed to our success. We have remained open to partnership and open to new technologies. We know that there are a lot of great ideas out there, there are a number of things that partners do better than us that we can leverage and learn from. It's important to recognize that we can't do everything ourselves. I would use antivirus and content inspection as examples. We have relied on partners in those areas and delivered a great solution to our installed base as a result. An even better example is authentication. Whether it's managing users through LDAP, RADIUS, tokens, or management tools, we work with multiple vendors, and the benefit to our users is that they can pick the solution that works best for them. We know that requirements are different in different markets. One solution might be better in Asia, while another might be preferable in the U.S. It is important not just to say, "We're partnering," but also to work closely with the other vendors to make sure that we can deliver a joint solution that works.
But on top of all that, we are successful because of our people. We have excellent people, smart and capable. These people deliver the products, and their customer focus is what makes the products fit the market. We enable them to grow within Check Point. Over the years we have built an excellent management team with many managers that have personally grown within the company, and we have expanded their scope of responsibilities as Check Point has expanded.
It has been more than a year since Check Point acquired Zone Labs. As one of the few acquisitions that Check Point has made, please give us an update on how the integration has gone?
As a company, we have high standards. We look at other companies—potential acquisitions—with a critical eye, and we have high expectations for the companies that we do acquire. In the case of Zone Labs, we acquired a market leader. The acquisition added a range of new products to our portfolio, but it also added excellence in certain technology areas where we lacked it. We have integrated and will continue to further integrate the products, but we will also cross-leverage technologies to create solutions. For example, with the acquisition of Zone Labs, we can now create cooperative enforcement between the health of the endpoint and internal network policy. The endpoint products organization is now an integral and important part of our overall products organization. In all respects, there are great synergies in place.
The real threat that people should be concerned about are those that are never published. Sometimes a hacker finds a great vulnerability and never publishes it, but just uses it to attack your system.
What do you see as the main Internet security threats today? What new technologies can prevent them?
I've been at Check Point for 10 years. A lot has changed in 10 years. The world of security was more naive at the beginning of the Internet era and purely reactive. It was enough to set up a good policy. Eventually, people became more creative about networks and applications, and they have returned to a complete sense of security. One needed to figure out how to create preventive technologies. There are quite a few technologies that Check Point has designed for prevention. These technologies try to identify if something is happening and combat it.
What real threats should we be concerned about?
The real threats that people should be concerned about are those that are never published. Sometimes a hacker finds a great vulnerability and never publishes it, but just uses it to attack your system. You have to build a secure architecture, with different components, and build in specific security devices that fit different elements.
As vice president of products for Check Point Software Technologies, Dr. Dorit Dor manages all product development functions for the company. Her core responsibilities include leading the company's research and development (R&D) and quality assurance (QA) initiatives from the development stage to the delivery stage. Before joining Check Point, Dor served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) managing various R&D teams. In 1993, she won the Israel National Defense Prize.