The Damage is Spreading: It’s Time to Rein in the NSA and Reform Surveillance Practices

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• The fallout continues to spread as a result of the disclosure of NSA surveillance activities involving cloud computing and other technology companies
• It’s time IT professionals get involved and call for reform and better oversight

New and startling revelations on NSA data gathering activities continue to peel away like an onion skin from the Edward Snowden leak, and as they do, it becomes ever so much clearer that the NSA has gone way, way too far.   And indeed it is time to reform regulation and oversight of NSA and other intelligence agency surveillance activities. 

Mainstream Enterprises Still Struggling to Catch Up with the MDM/MAM Hype Cycle

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Despite hype to the contrary, mobile device management and mobile application management is not mainstream

• Innovative vendors are out in front solving problems that most enterprises haven’t begun to even think about

The juxtaposition of this week’s strategic partnership announcement between Boxtone and Good Technology against our mid-October report on enterprise BYOD progress in 2012 serves as a great example of how big the disconnect is between the hype of MDM/MAM and reality of mainstream enterprise adoption of policies governing the use of employee-owned devices at work. The Boxtone/Good agreement calls for the integration of Good’s mobile application and data security functionality found in its Good Dynamics and Good for Enterprise products with BoxTone’s mobile device, analytics, and service management functions. The analytics piece, due in 2013, is especially intriguing. Planned instrumentation will allow enterprise IT to determine the frequency of use for mobile enterprise applications, monitor application performance and utilization, and monitor user behavior to learn whether enterprise mobile applications require end user training or ease of use enhancements. Such analytics will allow enterprises to get more bang for the development buck and insure desired productivity gains are achieved.

Next-Generation Firewalls Poised to Eclipse Intrusion Prevention Systems

P. Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Readers who are considering adding new IPSs to their network should ask what their suppliers’ plans are for next-generation firewall (NGFW) features and how far along they are in delivering those.
• Additional features that come with a NGFW make it a more complex security tool to manage, and enterprises should be prepared to invest in training should they plan to add NGFWs to their arsenal.

Are standalone IPSs becoming the next stateful packet inspection firewall (i.e., an old perimeter security technology that is required but no longer sufficient for protecting enterprise networks)?  Sophisticated and well-financed malware writers consistently find new ways of getting around existing and well-understood security controls such as the firewall and IPS, even as those suppliers race to keep up with the constantly changing threat landscape.  The result has been a constant stream of breach headlines (too many being rather spectacular) that all point to the rise of the so-called ’advanced persistent threat’ (APT).  Enterprises looking to address such threats are coming to embrace the NGFW and the greater application and user context it brings to the fight against more sophisticated cyber attacks.  The NGFW integrates the functions of a stateful firewall and IPS with the ability to identify applications and application-level attacks and apply granular policies to applications usage.  One forecast puts the IPS market at $2 billion by 2014, while the NGFW market is projected to reach $4 billion by 2014.