Andrew Carnegie once said this: 'The way to become rich is to put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.' While this quip from the industrialist might have been useful folksy advice for Grandma and Grandpa, it is terrible guidance for the modern computing and application system designer. A much better mental image in computer science today involves distribution – and the correct unit for scattered computation is the workload.
With the RSA Conference at T-minus two weeks, I wanted to share some heartfelt advice with those of you now doing vendor booth planning. My advice comes from many years of standing on either side (seller and buyer) of that little porto-table with its stacks of data sheets and bowls of Hershey kisses. My hope is that this advice will help you to maximize the ROI for your little slice of exhibitor heaven in Booth 7002 of the South Expo.
While waiting to go on-camera last week at Yahoo Finance, I was mulling about, chatting up the other guests outside the studio. A woman was seated nearby with her laptop, and when I introduced myself as a cyber security professional, she summarized her view of my life’s work in three words: Man, these passwords. And then, she offered a concise and entirely correct solution to the problem – also in just three words: We need AI.
Much of what you learned in Operating Systems 101 is no longer applicable to modern computing – and virtualization lies at the root (ahem) of this change. The core principle is that physical host machines are now used to run multiple guest virtual machines (VMs) to optimize the use of memory, bandwidth, and CPU.
Arguably the best moment of my career was reaching Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs. The award was given during a fancy ceremony, and my wife got a pretty corsage and a bonus check. But what was the real gift that came with this wonderful award? What did the greatest American tech company of all time – the one that brought us lasers, and transistors, and Unix – consider a suitable award? Well, they gave me a private office.
The two most prominent providers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) security have now merged: Boston-based Onapsis announced this week that they have acquired Heidelberg-based Virtual Forge. While the deal terms were undisclosed, we do know that the resulting company will have three hundred staff, which creates a solid global base on which to drive growth. Led by Mariano Nunez, this newly-combined team looks formidable.
The Wikipedia entry for managed services has its first reference to security at Word 345 of the narrative. When you Google 'managed services', the People-Also-Searched-For box lists cloud computing, data center, IT service management, outsourcing, and Software-as-a-Service, with no references to security. Suffice it to say, managed services from MSPs are viewed as broader and largely distinct from managed security services from MSSPs.
Fifty years ago, the surprisingly political Smothers Brothers convinced CBS to let Pete Seeger perform on their show his anti-war protest song, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. The famous song’s perfect title reflects its basic Vietnam-era premise – namely, that our country was stuck in a terrible situation with no obvious solution. And like the sad hero of the song, once you get stuck deep enough in the mud, there might be no escape.
When you hear the term high-speed packet capture, what comes to mind? For me, the term has always conjured thoughts of comprehensive lawful intercept, broad metadata analysis, critical infrastructure protection, and on and on.
Thirty years ago, I needed a Russian alphabet for Unix troff (yea, I know – but please don’t ask). Online search tools didn’t exist back then, so finding a workable package was tougher than you’d expect. After some poking around, I managed to locate a colleague at Bell Labs – Eric Grosse – who had what I needed. He possessed a library of Cyrillic glyphs that could be easily mapped to our troff text input. It worked perfectly for our stealthy project.
“If you took all the men and women employed in the U.S. insurance industry and laid them head to toe, starting on New York’s William or John Street – the little-talked-about insurance industry equivalents of neighboring Wall Street – they would stretch up the West Side Highway, head to toe, over the George Washington Bridge into N.J., down the N.J. Turnpike to the Pa. Turnpike, across Pa. into Ohio, through Ohio along Interstate 80 past Chicago, past Des Moines, past Lincoln, Nebraska – still head to toe, one after another – past Cheyenne, Wyoming to someplace just shy of Salt Lake City.”
When my kids were small, there was this torturous jingle on Sesame Street that combined the letters of the English alphabet into a jumbled melody.
In my private files, I have a note from Dorothy Denning saying that she enjoyed my 1998 book on intrusion detection. If you live in the security industry, then you’ll know that this is like having Einstein tell you he liked your physics paper. Professor Denning was the first, for example, to show that activity timelines could identify anomalies from normal behavior. Her 1987 IDES paper remains iconic reading for all students studying cyber security.
Perhaps more than any other analyst in our industry, I’ve been bullish on the prospects for run-time application self-protection (RASP). And I’ve been covering (and admiring) RASP solution provider Prevoty for almost three years. So, when I read that Imperva had acquired Prevoty earlier this year, I was pleased on several fronts – but primarily, because I believe that the broad application security sector must begin to consolidate – and fast.
One of my PhD thesis advisors at the Stevens Institute of Technology was a mathematician named Steve Bloom. Among the late, great Dr. Bloom's amazing research accomplishments include mathematical analysis of computational structures and equational properties of fixed point operations.
Today’s technology executive plays a pivotal role in helping his or her organization respond to these forces of change. In essence, they serve as conductors to orchestrate the three pillars of organizational success – people, processes, and technology – and to draw upon their unique view of the enterprise to bring these elements into harmony.
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