What Is Keeping Your COO Awake at Night?

rough idea of where they want the protection to go, some do not. “Those are our favorites,” Kelleher acknowledged. “If they haven’t a clue, we’ll do an assessment and find their weak spots for them.” Often enough these vulnerabilities will come as a surprise to the client. Unisys will determine what needs to be focused on first, next, and so on. Then, from its robust suite of security solutions, many of which are built on other companies’ technologies, it will fashion the necessary armor.

“We’re not just a hardware company any more, as 80 percent of our business is geared towards IT consulting,” Kelleher told the Daily Wire. “We add value by incorporating technologies into complex solutions for our clients. We’ll utilize an excellent product from another company - one that helps manage role-based access, say — and we’ll surround it with the business assessment and implementation expertise gained through the successful execution of similar solutions with other clients. The processes and experience we have are what ultimately make the tools effective for our clients.”

For a bank, Unisys would study the function of teller — the “role” — and assign access to resources, such as sensitive client data, accordingly. The role of senior vice president of finance would dictate a different assignment of access to applications. Unisys is very firm that in its own role of integrator it is uniquely equipped to help the bank management to make these judgments. Kelleher said, “From an integration perspective we ‘blueprint’ their enterprise to let them see what the environment should look like. We make it come to life for them.”

Here again, the company believes its experience yields the best possible schema for a given client. When it is implemented, the client will have gained the high ground. This is ground that it must fight to keep. Kelleher repeatedly stressed that safety is relative; that 100 percent is an ideal, just that; that some entity or other is unceasingly at work to breach even the best defenses.

He recalled the period of very heavy spending on hardware, in the late 1990s, when companies wanted security - the more, the better. There was a notion that, if only they got enough in place, fast enough, they would be safe. “They quickly learned that just loading up on firewalls didn’t make them good to go for all time, or even for a few years,” Kelleher said. “Enterprise