- As I mentioned before, defense-in-depth,
- or layered security.
- So a couple things to think about.
- We have vendor diversity.
- So with vendor diversity, we want to utilize more
- than one vendor.
- So we reduce impacts of vulnerabilities, upgrades,
- and patching, potentially.
- Something to think about, if we have only one provider
- of all of our switches or all of our servers,
- or all of our network cards, you know, you pick
- your poison here, whatever it is,
- if we only have one of them, we're locked in,
- if they have a breach or a vulnerability,
- now that vulnerability is potentially everywhere.
- If we have multiple vendors, well yes, now you have
- multiple vendors to deal with, but you also limit
- the impact of a specific vulnerability,
- because maybe only a third or a quarter
- of your environment may be impacted.
- Some other things that are kind of the intangibles
- from an IT security perspective, things that the IT
- security professional may or may not really think about,
- is also vendor diversity gives you some leverage
- when dealing with those vendors, so you get better
- pricing, you might get better attention from that vendor,
- so they're actually updating their systems more often,
- because they want to earn your business.
- They don't just think that they're the only game in town,
- but they realize that they're competing with
- other vendors for your business,
- they're going to be a lot more attentive typically.
- So there's some intangibles there as well.
- Also, control diversity, more gates for a hacker
- to get through.
- Right, the more locks on the door, the harder it is
- for them to accomplish their task.
- A lot of times they're going to say, well you know what,
- I'm going to spend my time on something that's a little bit
- easier of a target.
- So control diversity, again, for the same reasons
- we talked about vendor diversity,
- control diversity gives us the best of breed
- in a number of areas as well.
- Not the least of which is additional protection
- against vulnerabilities.