One of the key issues for my design work in the data security space was the number of different roles involved in the process. I created the model to the right after interviews with customers, consultants, sales enablement, and product managers who had worked in this space for a long time. This model and the details linked below helped shape our design, but I also learned when reviewing the model with new customers that many organizations had not matured their security processes to this level. They saw this model as a learning tool and wanted the design to guide them in its implementation.

One of the major pain points of the existing product was the time and effort required to get a working security system up and running. To simplify this task, I worked with our internal architects and services team to automate much of the process. The screen to the right/below shows the few simple steps in the new design needed to get to active protection for sensitive data. Users simply needed to choose a security standard (like PCI, SOX, or HIPAA) and the datasources to apply it to, and all the setup, discovery, and policies would be implemented in the background.

The security analyst role is responsible for monitoring the sensitive data and privileged users on a set of datasources. I designed a similar dashboard for the analyst as I had for the operations. This allowed for separation of duties (those setting policies are not monitoring the activity and vis versa), and gave analysts a realtime picture of security violations and vulnerabilities. The expanding column groups and click to show alert lists allowed for interactive triage.

Another design I explored with my lead visual designer was an enterprise-wide topology view. This would server a similar purpose to the Security Operations Dashboard and the Security Analyst Dashboard, but allows for more visual zooming and allows for visual represenation of the structure of the security enterprise.

One of the first problems I worked on in the data security space was how to help users find security intrusions and vulnerabilities, and how to help them prevent a repeat of the problem in the future. Before building the larger design team, I created this set of mockups with input from the CTO of and showed how we could apply faceted browsing to integrate key security data and help users find problems quickly. We also tied related tasks to the context of browsing — all of this was scattered and impossible to find in the existing product.

While many of our design were viewable on mobile devices, one of my designers and I made an effort to look at designs specifically for the mobile platforms. The Health Summary shown to the right/below in tablet and smartphone form factors showed how the quantity of health information shown in our dashboards and topology views could be summarized for mobile platforms. At the time, this was not a high priority for our users.