The area of security has the most increased focus recently is protecting the endpoint. Once you stop snickering, it makes some sense. For years (or decades, depending on how cynical you want to be) endpoint security was the beneficiary of the compliance driver. Whether the technologies actually protected anything was beside the point. Assessors would show up, and you needed to have AV. Then advanced attackers happened and the industry started innovating, starting with network security, leaving…
Woo Hoo! It’s New Paper Friday!
Over the past month or so you have seen Adrian and myself put together our latest work on encryption. This one is a top-level overview designed to help people decide which approach should work best for datacenter projects (including servers, storage, applications, cloud infrastructure, and databases). Now we have pieced it together into a full paper.
I’ve had one conversation about 8 times this week:
“Ready for RSA?”
“Not even close.”
“Yeah, figured it would be better since they pushed it out an extra month, but not so much.”
It’s been over a month since I wrote an Incite. It’ is the longest period of downtime since I joined Securosis. I could talk about my workload, which is bonkers right now. But over the years I’ve written the Incite regardless of workload. I could talk about excessive travel, but I haven’t been traveling nearly as much as last year. I could come up with lots of excuses, but as I tell my kids all the time, “I’m not in the excuses business.”
Last week we saw a security company hit the $2.4B valuation level. Yes, that’s a ‘B’, as in billion. This week we dig into the changing role of money and investment in our industry, and what it might mean. We like to pretend keeping our heads down and focusing on defense and tech is all that matters, but practically speaking we need to keep half an eye on the market around us. It not only affects the tools at our disposal, but influences the entire course of our profession.
I spend a lot of time on Apple security, more for personal reasons than anything else. They are the tools I use every day, and where I send most of my friends and family to manage their digital lives, so my investment runs deeper than anything financial. I have been the Security Editor over at TidBITS since about the time I founded Securosis, but I am not the only security expert over there. Joe Kissell has himself written books on the topic, and plenty of articles (mostly at TidBITS and…
There seems to something missing for us Securosis folks now that it’s the beginning of March. After some reflection we realized it’s that dull ache in our livers from surviving yet another RSA Conference. The show organizers had to move the conference to April this year, to ensure a full takeover of San Francisco. Regardless of when the conference is, there is one thing you can definitely count on: the DRB!
We were invited to run a two-hour learning lab on a topic of our choice this year at the RSA Conference. I suspect it will surprise… no one… that we chose Pragmatic SecDevOps as our topic.
Rich here.
Not to get too personal, but I had a dream about being back on ski patrol last night.
Last week the US Director of National Intelligence said cyberattacks are a greater risk than terrorism. This week we debate what that means, and whether terminology is getting so muddled that it becomes meaningless. Plus we rip into Rich’s post claiming security people need to stop thinking of themselves as warriors, and start thinking like spies.