Greg YoungWhen driving a motorcycle slowly and wanting to go left, you turn the handlebars to the left. When going fast and wanting to turn left very quickly, you turn the handlebars to the right. What? Huh? The magic of counter-steering. If you haven’t obtained permission from your spouse/significant-other/your-inner-cool-self to get a motorcycle, it works on a bicycle too (but make motorcycle sounds to have more fun).
So the rules of physics don’t change, but neither are they expanded linearly. Security inspection at higher speeds is like that. An all-in-one firewall is a really good choice for most small and lower-end midsize companies. The load of differing profile inspection loads is not so great as to warrant the overhead of having different point security products. Find out when it is time to turn the handlebars in the other direction – there comes a point in growth when simply expanding into a larger single device doesn’t work anymore. As in driving, there are always exceptions to the rule (counter-steering at high speeds while driving over a wide white pavement marker in the rain is a great way to see what the non-shiny side of the motorcycle looks like).
I have a research note on current critical network security issues with section titled “There Is No UTM For The Enterprise”. In our joint presentation at the Gartner Security Summit back in June, my colleague John Pescatore and I gave a segment on the differing requirements and future for the network security (netsec) platforms in the SMB, Enterprise and Carrier space, including the differences between edge and internal/datacenter platforms. John is presenting on some netsec trends as part of his presentation at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando on 12 Oct. 08, as I am at the Gartner Enterprise Network & Communications Summit in Orlando in November. We’ll also be making this available in the near future on the Gartner for IT Leaders Security & Risk Management portal.
During the last 3 days at MES I worked with quite a few CIOs of midsize enterprises helping many of them get rid unneeded appliances, or make the move to point-products and get better value and performance. Think about whether rationalizing netsec products or redesigning your DMZ needs to move to the your security agenda. And if your netsec vendors aren’t helping you do this …
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