I spent Wednesday visiting with several of our enterprise customers at their offices. I find these face to face meetings very enjoyable and informative: in person is always a better exchange than by phone
One of the recurring themes for the day was Nokia. Many of the companies I met with happened to be using Check [...]
Entries from November 2008
Nokia Firewall Questions
November 28th, 2008 · No Comments
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ITSec Downturn Marketing
November 25th, 2008 · No Comments
ITSec has a long and shameful history of taking any newsitem and trying to find a nexus that means you need more ITSec. The worm turns, and we are seeing another barrage of bad marketing around linking the downturn and ITSec in some very unbelievable ways.
Don’t reward companies that use FUD like hackers will have [...]
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New Network Firewall Magic Quadrant Published
November 24th, 2008 · No Comments
The 2H09 Enterprise Network Firewall Magic Quadrant (MQ) was published on Friday here.
This edition of the firewall MQ was more challenging than most years because the acquisition of Secure Computing by McAfee, and the announcement by Nokia of changes to their security appliance business happened in the middle of the analysis. Also, my coauthor John [...]
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Security in The Cloud – The Musical
November 19th, 2008 · No Comments
The blogosphere and vendorsphere is shrill with talk about cloud security. I’ve started translating these rants by replacing the word "cloud" with "PKI", and if the assertion still makes sense, I ignore it.
This morning I delivered a presentation on In the Cloud Security at the Gartner Enterprise Network Conference (and yes, I self-assessed by applying [...]
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Dr. No and Yes-Men
November 17th, 2008 · No Comments
I’m at the Gartner Enterprise Networking Summit in Orlando, Florida. The previous sentence provides two interesting segues: first, I’m reminded why so many northeasterners winter in Florida, and second, the majority of attendees here work in enterprise networking, the organizational colleague of network security.
There is a stereotype that Security people say ‘no’ all the [...]
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Making Ottawa Lemonade
November 14th, 2008 · 2 Comments
(Infrequently, I’ll divert from security blogging to provide some regional items.)
When life hands you lemons…
The Ottawa tech sector is a smoking crater. The tech salad days in Ottawa saw JDS being a large employer, Nortel trading above $100, the stellar early successes of companies like Entrust, Newbridge and Corel, and a burgeoning start-up culture [...]
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The Secure Web Gateway Will Not Converge With Enterprise Firewalls
November 13th, 2008 · No Comments
This week Peter Firstbrook, Adam Hils and I published a research note titled The Secure Web Gateway Will Not Converge With Enterprise Firewalls.
This note was the product of some cross-group discussions, where we examined the different deployments of SWG and firewalls in enterprises, branch offices and small and midsize businesses (SMB).
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Before And After IPS Slides
November 13th, 2008 · No Comments
Security companies can lose sight of you, the customer, and get distracted with only what competitors are doing. Sure, you want some competitive comparison but you should look for vendors who tell you what you will get as a result of all these claims. Every IPS vendor claims to be best at delivering IPS signatures [...]
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Gartner Enterprise Networking and Communications Summit (Next Week)
November 10th, 2008 · No Comments
From the 17-19th of Nov. I’ll be at the Gartner Enterprise Networking and Communications Summit (aka Net3). From the security team, Lawrence Orans will also be there as well. The event is at the Gaylord Hotel in Orlando, FL.
I spend most of my conference time attending security themed events, so Net3 will be interesting. [...]
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NetSec Surcouf
November 10th, 2008 · No Comments
Network and host security are cousins, but not close ones. In enterprises, they have different operations centers, buying priorities and budgets, and different business and service goals. No, they won’t converge any time soon. Yes, there are some marginal benefits to having some links, such as visibility between network and host so you can coordinate [...]
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