From APES to Bespoke Security Automated as a Service

Many of the most innovative security start-ups I come across share a common heritage - their core product evolved from a need to automate the delivery of an advanced service that had begun as a boutique or specialized consulting offering. Start-ups with this legacy tend to have bypassed the “feature looking for a problem” phase that many others struggle with and often launch their products on day-one alongside a parade of satisfied marque accounts.


While there isn’t a universal formula for success, over my years delivering boutique professional security services, I have been very lucky to encounter that product evolution several times, usually resulting from consultants intelligently automating the repetitive parts of their jobs away and creating a new class of product.


For example, around the turn of the millennium, when penetration testing came to the fore as the cutting edge in security consulting, the need for automating away the drudgery of port scans and vulnerability scanning was obvious. The first foray led to tooling that freed up consultants to focus on the “art” of bug hunting and recognition that some customers needs were satisfied with those basic capabilities. During my time at Internet Security Systems, that first automation came to be known as the “monkey scan” – because of how easy it was to run. Of course, once the marketing team got wind of customers purchasing the scanning service, a more sensible name was needed and so Automated Perimeter and Enterprise Scanner (APES) was born. From humble beginnings, that X-Force managed service line business grew and, through acquisition, its legacy continues today as part of IBM’s Managed Security Services Provider (MSSP) business. 


Automation of repetitive consulting tasks is an obvious and critical element, but so too is the need to ensure consistency and exh ..

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