What does a large enterprise need most in the event of a security breach? It turns out it’s not an entire galaxy of years-old point solutions. Nor is it a bunch of confused staffers behaving like The Three Stooges. Cutting the complexity of security programs is a crucial step in effective cyberdefense these days, said Mary O’Brien (pictured), general manager of IBM Security at IBM Corp.

There will be approximately 2 million unfilled security posts by 2020, according to O’Brien. Companies must find ways to make the staff they have more efficient at dousing fires.

“We’ve got to get to the point where the response is muscle memory,” she said. Everyone needs know their role beforehand in order to slide down the fire pole and get to work.

“Everybody from the person who is at your reception desk who may be the first person to meet the media as they come in your doors after an event, to the CSO who has responsibility, to the president or CEO needs to understand their role and when they partake or when they back away,” O’Brien stated.

O’Brien spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed how IBM is helping clients tighten and tune their security programs. (* Disclosure below.)

Security relationship counseling

While there is shortage of skills, many companies have the opposite problem with actual technologies.

“In many of our clients shops, we will find up to 80 different security products from 40 different vendors,” O’Brien said. “You have all of these tools and all of these products that have been bought to solve security threat du jour over several decades.”

What’s worse, they often don’t even talk to each other. That is where IBM’s Security Connect platform comes in. It can open the lines of communication between products and get them acting as a happy family.

It brings together the insights from different tools and knits them together for a more holistic view. It provides a faster route to what’s relevant in a client’s industry, region or business, O’Brien pointed out.

“We look for the insights that are indicative of the most significant threat to you to help you get there, sort it, eradicate it, quarantine, or whatever you need to do to eliminate it,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE