As more companies continue to transition their critical business applications to the cloud, network security is becoming even more paramount. To properly defend themselves from malicious online attacks, enterprises have started employing the help of security experts who have experience as hackers.

One of the preeminent firms that offer this unique vulnerability management service is eEye Digital Security, which has been providing assessment, mitigation and online protection solutions since 1998.

eEye was co-founded by Marc Maiffret, who has testified before Congress regarding national cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection on three separate occasions and was actually investigated by the FBI as a teenager hacker.

TMC's (News - Alert) Erin Harrison recently caught up Maiffret at ITEXPO West 2010 to find out a bit more about his company and what he sees as the future of cybersecurity.

As Maiffret explains, eEye provides companies with the ability to look at their network in the same manner that hackers would, and then designs solutions to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities.

"The foundation of eEye was to provide businesses with the same view that I had when I was getting into their networks," said Maiffret, who co-founded the company at 17 and remains its acting CTO.

The ex-hacker noted that too many companies are deploying stock security solutions without first understanding what it is they are trying to protect.

"Every security company says they have the silver bullet," Maiffret said. "You look at the marketing of security companies and we all say we can fix the same problems, even though we are doing very different things underneath. So the biggest challenge for IT folks is to cut through that noise and figure out what is truly going help at the end of the day."

Maiffret suggests that business leaders define what is most important to them and then develop a customized IT process to secure that data.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.