SAS often takes software development cues from businesses but the company’s new move into cybersecurity was triggered by consumers – specifically consumers’ increasing use of financial applications on mobile devices.
The Cary company’s first cybersecurity offering is expected to roll out in first quarter of 2014. While cybersecurity is of interest to a wide range of industries SAS will initially target financial institutions, government agencies and the oil and gas industries.
SAS has been tracking cybersecurity for the past seven to eight years but the market more recently emerged as viable for a SAS offering, said Ellen Joyner, SAS Global Marketing Principal for SAS Security Intelligence.
“A lot of this in financial services has been driven by mobile malware types of problems that banks have been struggling with since mobile became one of the channels of preference for consumers,” Joyner told WRALTechWire at SAS’ media day event. “There’s a nice connection between how do we make our mobile phones secure and how do we prevent organized crime from attacking through those mobile phones.”
Joyner said that she could not get into specific details about the forthcoming SAS cybersecurity offering but she said that it will consolidate disparate sources of data and flag abnormal behavior. For example, if someone tried to log onto the system from a different country or an IP address that is different from the one customarily used by a customer, that attempt could be flagged as a possible threat. This “context-aware” security application would provide more information about what is happening at a particular moment, enabling companies to react in real time.
The threat posed to businesses by cyberattacks is not just a financial one. Lost customer trust is the most significant impact of cyberattacks, according to a recent survey by Longitude Research. But even though 39 percent of respondents thought that loss of customer trust was the biggest threat to their organization just 25 percent of those respondents felt highly prepared for cyberattacks. The survey of 250 respondents from retail and commercial financial institutions was sponsored by SAS.
