John Pescatore

Today we have a guest blogger from Gartner’s Security group, Avivah Litan:
The Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business regulation (OCABR) recently extended the deadline for compliance to Executive order no. 504 from Jan. 1 until May 1. This law, which requires encryption of data, is said to be the strictest data security law in [...]

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“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. 
From Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862
 
Honoring Abraham Lincoln as the official designator of Thanksgiving in the US, the rest of that quote: “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is [...]

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I spent most of Saturday assembling Ikea furniture for my mother-in-law’s new seniors apartment. Those Swedes are ingenious – by selling unassembled furniture in flat boxes, they lower their shipping costs and push the assembly costs onto their customers. It’s a cost tradeoff, of course: my mother in law’s purchase price was much lower, and [...]

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We had a fun bloggie style discussion on measuring the value of security programs a while back. All attempts to do so always run into problems measuring the cost or the benefits.  Everyone talks as if businesses make business decisions based on hard facts used to scientifically calculate return on investment or hurdle rates or [...]

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Today my 401k portfolio is worth about 50% less than it was a year ago. I don’t want to even estimate the value of my house but it is probably worth at least 20% less today than a year ago. A year ago the “wisdom of the crowd” way overvalued my net worth, today it [...]

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There’s a lot of squishy management crap that we all laugh at. For several years, Gartner has paid some firm to survey employees to find out if we are “engaged,” and if we have friends at work. I worked at GTE for many years and had to go to team-building exercises and management training classes [...]

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PCI Security Standards Council increased QSA reporting; conflict of interest quagmire remains.

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Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential – Winston Churchill

Plans are nothing; planning is everything.– Dwight D. Eisenhower

No battleplan survives contact with the enemy. – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

                         Wiki entry for “plan”
Time magazine recently had an interesting piece on Macolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers.” In the book [...]

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A while back I asked the Gartner analysts who cover insurance for an estimate on what percentage of business revenues are typically spent on insurance.  They came back with the range of .14% to .23% of revenue. Then I went to the Gartner analysts who cover overall IT spending and asked them what percentage of [...]

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“The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war.” ~Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit

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