Wet Your Beak, or Drown Trying

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

•  If a vendor can possibly tie its messaging to BYOD, it has.
• Vendors need to be careful though; the game is changing.

One of my takeaways from attending Interop a couple of weeks ago was the pervasiveness of BYOD as an addressable use case in vendor pitches.  At some point, a line from The Godfather Part II came to mind.  Neighborhood crime boss Don Fanucci tells the young godfather (played by Robert De Niro), “You should let me wet my beak a little,” by which he means he wants a piece of the action. It’s a colorful phrase, and it’s exactly the attitude of many technology companies today.

Interop: NAC is Back

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• Several vendors have announced enhanced network access control (NAC) products for addressing BYOD
• The Trusted Computing Group announced a new revision to an important NAC standard (TNC IF-MAP)

I spent the week in Las Vegas at Interop and one of the meta-themes at the event was the issue of how to deal with consumerization of IT and the associated business policy of allowing employee-owned devices on corporate networks. (i.e., BYOD). As I have noted before on this blog, consumerization of IT has far-ranging impacts on enterprise IT requirements and product development strategies. This includes products being enhanced to support the increasing traffic requirements inherent in broad deployment of mobile devices, but it also includes old products finding new life when applied to mobile use cases. A great example of the latter is the re-emergence of NAC to address consumerization of IT.

Context is King

A. Braunberg

Summary Bullets:

• Security is a data management problem and context is metadata
• Context drives better policy management and better policies drive better risk management

Context is a word you hear an awful lot these days when talking to security vendors. Everything it seems needs to be put into context, and by that security vendors typically mean that knowing the who, what, when, where and why of network traffic is very useful in determining the “legitimacy” of that traffic. It’s kind of like when firewalls became stateful, the realization that it’s better not to look at each packet in a complete vacuum. Context is the back story, if you will, of each packet traversing a network. Viewed from a data perspective, context is metadata.