Is the Current Generation of SIEM Tools Up to the Task?

P. Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises are evolving their expectations of SIEM technology from a compliance check box item to security operations management.
• Enterprises should ask their SIEM suppliers hard questions about their ability to scale cost effectively and provide meaningful analytics without requiring a new and expensive expert well versed in both security and big data.

Despite the maturity of the security information and event management (SIEM) market and some consolidation in recent years, there are still a large number of vendors.  At the same time, the market continues to grow at double-digit rates, with the most current growth rates projected at about 15% annually.

M2M: Operators vs. IT Service Providers

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• Operators note that the annual increases in their M2M connections are running in the 25-40% range, which aligns with their own predictions and with overall industry growth estimates that would lead to a market of several billion connections by 2020.
• As connectivity commoditizes, however, value-added services are the real ‘meat,’ estimated to generate as much as 70-80% of the total M2M revenue base over time.  What are the IT service providers doing to get some of this service revenue for themselves?

IT service providers are not standing idly by as operators start to offer consulting, advisory, and managed services for M2M.  In fact, many of them are actually empowering operators to gain M2M revenues through their telco vertical practices.  For example, Accenture and Tech Mahindra empower operators by offering assistance in making telcos’ business models more profitable, and by providing custom application development for the carriers’ enterprise customers.  However, there is an increasingly blurry line between what operators need to do to go up the value chain and what IT service providers traditionally do themselves.  How aggressive are companies such as IBM, Accenture, Logica, and Tech Mahindra in M2M; which areas provide partnering opportunities; and which areas do they want for themselves?  A few examples:

Interop 2012: Virtualize, Mobilize, Exercise (Bring Walking Shoes)

M. Spanbauer

Summary Bullets:

• Interop 2012 promises to be larger than the 2011 show, a good sign of enterprise interest and investment in network technologies.
• Mobility, virtualization, fabrics, and cloud services will dominate much of the discussion surrounding the trade show.

With the 2012 Las Vegas Interop just over a week away, inquiries and invitations have been flooding in.  From wireless to fabrics to virtualization and everything cloud-related, there is a great deal of energy and excitement around enterprise challenges and how best to address them (with a great deal of differentiation between offerings).  UBM has brought together a compelling track list and the open sessions are almost certain to be full every day, so get registered and get to the rooms early to ensure a seat.  Last year, many popular sessions were standing room only, and this year is almost certain to command similar audiences.  Virtualization challenges, evolving management platforms, and vendor interoperability will be key for data center-centric pitches, while most campus and organizational issues touch upon consumerized IT and the host of challenges around BYOD.

Vertical Target: Financial Services Firms Under Threat

A. DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• The nature of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is evolving with more frequent and intense events of shorter duration now the norm
• Cyberattackers are training their sights on high-profile targets such as financial services but no organization is immune

The threat landscape is in a constant state of flux as hackers’ strategies shift and the targets of their attacks change.  DDoS attacks offer one very revealing window into how the threat environment is changing.  Incidents tracked by DDoS vendor Prolexic’s Engineering and Response Team (PLXsert) in Q1 2012 show that while the number of attacks remained relatively constant this quarter and last, the frequency of incidents surged 25% from Q1 2011.  Financial firms proved a particularly attractive target for DDoS attacks:  In Q1 2012, financial services firms were inundated with 65TB of data and 1.1 trillion packets of malicious data leveled against them during DDoS attacks, up from 19.1TB of data and 14 billion packets the previous quarter.  This represents an almost 80-fold increase malicious traffic volume. 

Cloud-based Contact Centers – The Appeal Beyond OpEx vs. CapEx

K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

• Cloud service offerings in the contact center are proliferating, and more often than not they are reaching the short lists of decision makers who select customer care applications.
• Many considering a cloud-based contact center solution summarize the appeal in terms of capital to operating expense conversion and seldom note the potential benefits in the area of disaster recovery.

It was difficult to walk the exhibit floor of the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando a few weeks ago without realizing that cloud services was given a major emphasis by exhibitors and show attendees alike. The program listed 46 exhibitors (more than 30% of total exhibitors) under the category of “Cloud-Based Services,” and the attendees flocked to any break-out sessions with the word “Cloud” in the title, which resulted in standing room only sessions in many cases. As an analyst who has been tracking the shift to the cloud in the contact center marketplace, I was very interested in the advantages of the cloud being highlighted by exhibitors and perceived by enterprises and SMBs with mission-critical contact center applications.

Consumerization of IT Is the Mega Trend

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• Consumerization of IT is having a pervasive impact on enterprise IT.
• It is much broader than simply worrying about device management and security.

My CEO asked me for a comprehensive, non-technical definition of the mobility market.  It got me thinking about how pervasive the impact of consumerization of IT has become.  I am buried in the day to day of a lot of our Enterprise Mobility coverage, but that is just the most obvious place that mobility impacts our enterprise coverage. Consumerization of IT is an important trend in our Application Platforms, Collaboration Platforms, Enterprise Networking, Unified Communications, and Enterprise Security coverage.  Certainly no other topic, with the possible exception of the cloud, gets as many cross-disciplinary conversations going in our enterprise group.  The following are short summaries of the impact of consumerization of IT on several of our coverage areas:

What Does Carrier Ethernet 2.0 Mean for the Enterprise?

J. Stradling

Summary Bullets:

• MEF CE 2.0 service provider certification is not yet available on end-to-end Ethernet services.
• There are compelling benefits arising from CE 2.0, but it will take time before these reach corporate users.

Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0 was unveiled by Bob Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet) and the MEF during February of this year, and it is designed to provide industry-wide benefits – to service providers, equipment manufacturers, and end users of Ethernet services, both business and residential.  So, how does CE 2.0 relate to the real-life requirements of corporate data networks?  In other words, if you are an IT manager looking after the enterprise data WAN, should you really care about CE 2.0?

Enterprise Connect Notebook

B. Riggs

Summary Bullets:

• Increasing sales of Interactive Intelligence’s hosted service could indicate rising acceptance of cloud services.
• HP is positioning itself as a supplier of the underlying infrastructure for UC solutions.

Enterprise Connect 2012 has come and gone.  Here are a few items from my notebook that did not make it into the reports I drafted for our syndicated service: Current Compete.

Cloud Buyers Beware as Suppliers Struggle

J. Caron

Summary Bullets:

• Service providers and technology companies are often criticized for being slow to market with cloud services.
• The cloud is as transformative for suppliers as it could be for IT, so gain assurances of stability before buying.

It is sometimes too easy to be critical of large service providers and technology companies as they grapple with the latest whims and fancies of enterprise IT taste.  The current phenomenon of cloud-based service models is a striking case in point.  As demand – or perceived demand, at least – grows for cloud infrastructure and applications, it has become quite clear that traditional suppliers are being forced to engage in all sorts of organizational gymnastics to cobble together, sell and support the services.  You have to pity them, really.  The transition from selling boxes and software to selling a pay-per-drink service is pretty complicated.  How will the service be built?  On what network will it run – theirs or somebody else’s?  How do they bill?  How do they provide support?  What about the resellers and distributors?  How much will existing revenue be cannibalized? With whom do they partner?

Security Worries: Friday the 13th Edition

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullet:

• Luck favors the prepared.
• Prepare for breaches through better visibility and forensic tools.

In Western cultures, Friday the 13^th is considered a particularly unlucky day.  The superstition is of relatively recent vintage, though it seems to derive from the separate but long-standing considerations that 13 is an unlucky number and Friday is an unlucky day.  Security folks are not a particularly superstitious lot, but I think we can all agree that we can use all the luck we can get.  However, any discussion about luck brings to my mind a famous quote that is usually remembered as “Luck favors the prepared (actually, the quote by Louis Pasteur is “Chance favors the prepared mind”).