About 4 years ago we saw the first big wave of replacements of older email security tools with a second generation we now call ‘content security’. Early email security products were deployed in-house and focused on anti-virus, anti-spam, and mail server integration. The current generation of products offered new SaaS and hybrid deployment models, technology advancements in web and content filtering, more elastic service sets, and centralized web management consoles. And let’s not forget the…
A few months back one my dogs knocked over one my speakers. Sent it flying, actually. 3’ 50lb wood cabinet speaker – as if it wasn’t there. The culprit is still a puppy, but when she gets ripping, she can pretty much take out any piece of furniture I own. And she has a big butt. She seems to run into everything butt first, which is impressive as she does not walk backwards. Wife calls her ‘J-Lo’. She learned how to spin from playing with my boxer, and now she spins out of control when she is…
In the security industry successful companies need have breadth and scale. Security is and will remain an overhead function, so end users must strive to balance broad coverage against efficiency to control, and hopefully reduce, overhead. Scoff as you may, but integration at all levels of the stack does happen, and that favors bigger companies with broader product portfolios.
If you read saw the press release title Symantec Introduces New Security Solutions to Counter Advanced Persistent Threats, what would you expect? Perhaps a detailed security monitoring solution, or maybe they bought a full packet capture solution, or perhaps really innovated with something interesting? Now what if told you that it’s actually about the latest version of Symantec’s endpoint protection product, with a management console for AV and DLP? You’d probably crap your pants from laughing…
Last weekend was a little oasis in the NFL desert that has been this offseason. It looked like there would be court-ordered peace, now maybe not so much. The draft reminded me of the possibilities of the new season, at least for a little while. One of the casualties of this non-offseason has been free agency. You know, where guys who have put in their time shop their services to the highest bidder.
Wrapping up our Software vs. Appliance series, I want to remind the audience this series was prompted by my desire to spotlight the FUD in Database Activity Monitoring sales processes. I have mentioned data collection as one of the topics Data collection matters. As much as we would like to say the deployment architecture is paramount for performance and effectiveness, data collection is crucial too, and we need to cover a couple of the competitive topics that get lumped into bake-offs.
For Database Activity Monitoring, Virtual Appliances result from hardware appliances not fitting into virtualization models. Management, hardware consolidation, resource and network abstraction, and even power savings don’t fit. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) disrupts the hardware model. So DAM vendors pack their application stacks into virtual machine images and sell those. It’s a quick win for them, as very few changes are needed, and they escape the limitations of hardware. A virtual…
I just wrote up my portions of tomorrow’s Incite, and talked a bit about the importance of standards in product selection. But it’s hard to treat cogently in 30 words, so let me dig into it a bit more here. Mostly because of prevailing opinion on the importance of standards, and to what degree standards support should be a key selection criteria.
I really enjoy having Gunnar Peterson on the team. Seems like every time we talk in our staff meeting I laugh and learn something – two rare outcomes in this profession. We were having a laugh Friday morning about the tendencies of software development organizations to trip over themselves in order to improve. Several different clients were having the same problem in understanding how to apply security to code development. Part of our discussion:
The entire credit card table was encrypted and we have no evidence that credit card data was taken. The personal data table, which is a separate data set, was not encrypted, but was, of course, behind a very sophisticated security system that was breached in a malicious attack.