Xceedium’s Glenn Hazard pays a friendly visit to GSN

Glenn Hazard

Glenn Hazard, a hard-charging CEO who has experienced success in growing and selling off software and information technology companies in the past, has taken on a new challenge: spearheading the expansion of Xceedium, a small IT security company currently based in Jersey City, NJ, for which Hazard sees a big future.

Hazard believes that Xceedium is ideally positioned to take advantage of what he envisions as the next wave in the never-ending effort to safeguard government and corporate computer networks.

Where “protecting the perimeter” used to be the mantra among IT security firms -- and the customers they aimed to protect -- that concept of “keeping the bad guys out” is no longer quite as fashionable. Today, the IT security world seems to recognize that threats can come from outside the network, from inside the network, and even from your own most trusted employees.

That’s why Xceedium has developed a new paradigm for IT security, which promises to protect a network from any threat, from any source, at any time. Hazard employs a user-friendly analogy to illustrate Xceedium’s basic philosophy:

Suppose Glenn Hazard lived in a gated community and you wanted to pay him a visit. In the “old days,” you might have driven up to the gatehouse, presented your driver’s license (proving you were who you claimed to be) and waited for the guard to phone Glenn, get his permission to let you into the community, and then waved you through the gate. That was all the protection Glenn was offered. Once you got past the gatehouse, you were free to roam around the community at will, visit any street, knock on any door, and enter any home whose door happened to be unlocked.

That’s not how Xceedium sees network security, Hazard told me when he visited GSN’s offices in New York City on July 16. His company operates on what he calls a “Zero Trust Model,” in which nobody is trusted to be 100 percent innocent, and everyone is monitored on a continuous basis.

If Xceedium were safeguarding the same gated community, you might drive up to the security gatehouse and present your driver’s license. The guard would check your credentials and then ask you to park your car in a nearby parking area and hop in the guard’s car, so the guard could drive you to Glenn’s house. Once there, the guard would ring the doorbell, verify that Glenn was willing to meet with you, and sit in his car immediately outside Glenn’s front door until your conversation was completed. You would then get back into the guard’s car, be driven back to your car, and watched closely as you left the property.

“The whole time you were in the gated community, you would be chaperoned,” explained Hazard. “You would only see what we have allowed you to see.”

Xceedium takes the same approach to protecting a computer network: External or internal visitors are authenticated, they are accompanied during their entire stay in the network, every move is monitored and logged, and their entire visit is audited after-the-fact, Hazard explained.

You are not free to roam about the network because you don’t get to keep your own IP address. “You have a zero footprint inside the network,” Hazard added, explaining that a visitor’s movements are restricted by Xceedium with the help of “encrypted reverse tunneling” technology.

Xceedium has distilled its philosophy into a software-driven appliance which has pulled together several different complimentary technical approaches in a more sophisticated way than Hazard has seen anywhere else. “I can’t find anyone else who has done all of this in a single appliance,” he proudly declares.

The heightened interest in cloud computing -- and the push from all sides for governments and businesses to collaborate externally and internally with a wide range of partners -- has coalesced into a strong need for an all-encompassing approach to security that augments “perimeter security,” without trying to replace it. That’s precisely where Hazard thinks Xceedium has positioned itself.

In the very near future, Hazard is likely to play an even more prominent role at the company, and he’ll soon be unveiling a federal advisory board of governmental and corporate IT security veterans.

Hazard has been right in the past. If he’s right again, we’ll all be hearing a lot more from Xceedium in the near future.

Editor's Note: A guest column written by Glenn Hazard was published on GSN's Web site on July 16.