ALIST: Johnnie Konstantas of Altor Networks

After our one-week hiatus from the ALIST series, we turn our attention back here to profile a key executive at Altor Networks. Johnnie Konstantas has a long track record of technical and marketing leadership success at leading companies such as Juniper Networks, CheckPoint, and most recently, Varonis Systems. Now, she leads the charge to market Altor Networks’ virtualization security products. Let’s get right to the interview…

Name: Johnnie Konstantas
Title/Role: Vice President of Marketing
Company: Altor Networks
Product Focus: Security for virtual data centers and clouds
Twitter Handle: @altornetworks

1. What is your company’s flagship product, and why is it important for security purposes?
Altor Networks’ flagship product is Altor VF – an industry first purpose-built firewall that offers comprehensive security of virtualized networks and the hypervisor. Now in it’s third major release, the Altor solution protects virtualized servers and the platform they run on from unwarranted access and malware without impacting throughput or virtualization’s scalability (i.e. vMotion, DRS).

2. What areas of security are most important to you professionally, and which do you enjoy working with most?
Virtual network and cloud security impact me most at the moment, since it’s my current charter to educate the market on the risks and mitigation strategies. After [having spent] 16 years in the market, there are a lot of areas which fascinate me, although I have to admit that, in this place I find myself now,  there is extreme gratification in seeding and educating a market on what you know to be imminent risks. You feel a little like Steve Carrell playing Noah in Evan Almighty, trying to convince the townspeople to come to the boat.

Evangelism: Explaining Virtualization Strategy Akin to Noah's Quandary

3. What is the most common security challenge you are brought in on to help fix on behalf of customers?
Restoring the virtual environment to a compliant or compliance-acceptable security posture is the biggest driver to Altor deployment at the moment. People virtualize their servers and then someone asks “How are we going to demonstrate access control enforcement and separation of duties?”

4. How do you see Cloud Computing, virtualization, and Social Media affecting security in the coming months?
Enterprises of all sizes are shifting their workloads to virtualized platforms in droves. When they do, the questions start flowing: How do I demonstrate compliance? How do I segment my resources? How do I control VM sprawl and mitigate security risks? There are available products and approaches, but the degree to which they preserve virtualization’s savings vary, so I suspect there will be a rush to educate and implement. To the extent that clouds may use virtualization as their platform, the net effect is the same. How do I protect my business and my customer’s assets?

[Companies need] corporate guidelines in play regarding what can be shared outside the firm via social media outlets, which largely requires that  people know the right thing to do. That effort is largely a focus on  building and “socializing” (pardon the pun) proper use policies.

5. Tell me what your most pressing security concern is over the next 1-2 years.
I worry that, in a rush to build green, efficient, data centers, well-intended folks who are short handed and following corporate mandates may shortchange security in the architecting of these new networks. I worry that my personal information maybe more at risk in the next two years than it is today.

6. How do you stay abreast of the latest market developments in your space? Shows, social media, RSS, etc.
All of the above. It is imperative to leverage the “groups” features of the various social media outlets so that you not only get the latest breaking stories, but for me as a marketeer, I need to understand what the prevalent attitudes are about a company, a market, a trend, etc.

7. In closing, give us one idea you have about security that everyone should consider. Your “Golden Egg”, so to say.
Assuming that you are using some sort of cloud service (and chances are good you are, i.e. Gmail, Hotmail, Salesforce), make sure you know what protects your piece of the cloud from someone else’s? What one measure, policy, or guarantee can the provider make to you?