SAN FRANCISCO — CenturyLink CSO Chris Betz says one of the biggest challenges in security is the sheer number of different and niche services. “As a CSO, part of the challenge that I have is taking all of these different technologies and tying them together into one consistent tapestry,” he said during an interview at this week’s RSA Conference.

The industry has been working on network-based security for about 25 years, and that’s a good thing for general knowledge and know-how, but too many companies and vendors are still stuck with a "very legacy model," he said.

With countless vendors targeting security from various stances and threats, and enterprises often using multiple overlapping and competing services, manual implementations of security remain far too prevalent, according to Betz.

“I want to put enterprises in the position where they don’t have to have teams of [up to 50] engineers maintaining their tapestry of firewalls” and instead focus those resources on harder problems that aren’t as well understood today, Betz said.

Much of that effort rests on big data processing, specifically machine learning. CenturyLink has built a platform that can ingest data streams, inform decisions about what’s allowed to transpire, and implement rules in an automated fashion across various technologies to bring those capabilities together, he said.

The goal with CenturyLink’s Rapid Threat Defense and other services in development is “to turn this kind of network-based security on its head” by aggregating intelligence feeds at an enterprise level and turning the challenge into a “real-time battle, and all without humans in the loop,” Betz explained.

“Because it’s a managed firewall, we get to see the telemetry off the device so we see who’s currently trying to get in, whether they were successful or not, [and] we can map that back against our threat intelligence,” he said. “It allows you to maximize the capability that’s one your device” without risking security on a granular or widespread level.

The service “starts us on that journey, actually a good chunk of the way down that journey, to make network security checkbox simple,” he said.

The security services that CenturyLink provides across the network are designed to work together and bolster the foundational elements of security, but it all starts with network services first and foremost, according to Betz.

Developing the architecture, or building clocks that allow these systems to talk together, is the hard part but also the empowering part because it opens up more opportunities for a comprehensive security posture, Betz said. “We’re making the fundamental investments that allow us to do that simplification across all network security services.”

While the security industry at large is fostering some unnecessary complexity by designing various, and sometimes specialized, tools that compete on some fronts and fall short in others, the bigger challenge for Betz is the variety of different technologies at play. “The technologies talk to each other and they haven’t been designed to talk to each other,” he said.

“I think that’s something that we as a security industry need to continue to invest in is how do we make it so that our solutions work better with each other, recognizing that adversaries use new and different techniques all the time,” Betz said. “I think it’s going to be a while before out-of-the-box things talk together as well as we’d like, and so it’s going to be incumbent on companies like CenturyLink to provide that seamless end-to-end journey while the overall security environment continues to mature.”