Greg Young

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Archives for March, 2009


Security Dark Ages

by Greg Young  |  March 25, 2009  |  12 Comments

If you aren’t a student of history, the Dark Ages were not what is thought of as a good time.  Things were going downhill, with science and  technology being forgotten in the general societal collapse in the early middle ages after the decline of the Roman empire: "sorry, can’t attend the Greek book club because [...]

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Recently Reading

by Greg Young  |  March 22, 2009  |  Comments Off

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.  Martin Lindstrom.  Using a functional MRI to test assumptions about marketing. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Nassim Nicholas.  No explanation required: check your 401K. SSL and TLS.  Eric Rescorla.  In the middle of the technical-depth gauge.

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Beware of Out of Context Firewall Claims

by Greg Young  |  March 19, 2009  |  Comments Off

I saw a quote where it seemed that the following real quote: “The next-generation firewall will have greater blocking and visibility into types of protocols,” says Greg Young, research vice president for Gartner was being interpreted to mean that there is an All In One or ‘UTM’ firewall for the enterprise. No. The Gartner position [...]

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Multifunction Firewall MarketScope Upgraded To Magic Quadrant

by Greg Young  |  March 17, 2009  |  2 Comments

The MarketScope for Small and Midsize Business (SMB) Multifunction Firewalls is being upgraded to a Magic Quadrant (MQ) for 2009.  The involved vendors have already been notified.  Adam and I will change roles for this research note – he will be lead author I’ll be his co-author. A MarketScope is used where a market is [...]

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"Cool Vendors" In Infrastructure Protection Research Note Published

by Greg Young  |  March 17, 2009  |  Comments Off

Our annual report on ‘cool’ vendors in infrastructure protection is available to our customers here.  This year we list 6 companies, most of whom you likely have not have heard of before.  ‘Cool’ vendors won’t necessarily be appropriate for every enterprise, but their offerings and business models point to new directions in their market spaces. [...]

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New Research Note On IT Security Spending

by Greg Young  |  March 16, 2009  |  Comments Off

Gartner analysts Vic Wheatman and Adam Hils have just published "2009 Update: What Organizations Are Spending on IT Security".  Gartner customers can find it here.  Vic heads up the Infrastructure Protection research team and has been researching security spend numbers for a lot of years, and Adam came to our group having spent time in [...]

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Gartner Security Summit 2009: June 28-July 1

by Greg Young  |  March 15, 2009  |  Comments Off

Spring is in the air, which means it is time to get my presentations in order for the annual Gartner Security Summit. The dates are June 28-July 1, and it will be near Washington DC at the Gaylord National in National Harbor, MD.  There are certainly a lot of security events out there.  This event [...]

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I Am A Twit(terer)

by Greg Young  |  March 13, 2009  |  Comments Off

Who tweets here: http://twitter.com/Gartnergreg

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21 Years Ago In IT Security

by Greg Young  |  March 12, 2009  |  2 Comments

I started my career in IT security in 1998 working as an Accreditor in the military.  On my first day I was asked "what did you do?" as in what did I do wrong.  The common view was that this the tarpit where careers went to die.  Instead, I was some kind of mutation having [...]

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Security Product Selection Requirements

by Greg Young  |  March 10, 2009  |  Comments Off

The largest part of my day is speaking with end-user buyers of technology; in Gartnerspeak we call these Inquiries. Two of my calls on a day this week were with enterprises looking at network IPS.  The first inquiry was to help develop the selection criteria and the result I think was very crisp in linking [...]

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