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Incite 12/19/2012: Celebration

Mike Rothman December 19, 2012 No Comments

As we say goodbye to Old Man 2012 and get ready to welcome Baby New Year 2013, it is time for some downtime and reflection. This will be the last Incite of the year. My focus over the next two weeks will be enjoying the accomplishments of the past 12 months. Which, by the way, is very hard for me. I came into the world with the unsatisfied gene. No matter how good it is, it can be better. No matter how much got done, I could have done more. With every accomplishment, I have already started looking towards the next goal because there are always more things to do, different windmills to tilt at, and another mountain to climb. But not this year. I will make a concerted effort to acknowledge where I’ve been and how far I’ve come. Both personally and professionally. And it will be a long time coming. The Boss and I were talking last night and she mentioned that we need to enjoy things a bit more. To have more fun. We have a great lifestyle and comforts I couldn’t have imagined, growing up in a much more modest situation, but it always seems we’re running from one place to the next. Fighting yet another fire, working on the next project, or filling up our social calendar. She is exactly right. I also need to celebrate life. We keep being reminded how fleeting it is. I will take some time to appreciate my good health and the health of my family. I will enjoy the quality time I get to spend with the people I care about. And I’ll be thankful for every day I get. At some point in the future, I will get an invitation to stop playing this game called life. Until then I plan to make the most of it. When I say ‘celebrate’, don’t expect a big blowout bash or any other ostentatious showing of prosperity. I like to celebrate in a low-key fashion. I’m not into material things, so I don’t celebrate a good year by buying things I don’t need. I’m also painfully aware that it’s still tough out there. Good fortune has overlooked many folks who have more talent and work harder than I do. These folks continue to struggle as the global economy continues its slow arduous recovery. More to the point, I know success is fleeting, and I have personally been down a lot more than I have been up. I’ll smile a bit thinking back on the last year, but I am all too aware there is more work to be done, and on January 1 the meter resets to 0. See? There I go again, moving forward even when I’m trying to stay in one place. We have wrapped up our 2013 planning at Securosis, and we have a good plan. As good as 2012 has been, it can get better. We will launch the Nexus, we will continue investing in our cloud security curriculum, and we will continue researching, using our unique Totally Transparent Research model. And there will also be a surprise or two out of us next year. It will all be a lot of work and I look forward to it. If it was easy everyone would be doing it. And I would be remiss if I didn’t thank all of you for reading our stuff, adding comments to our posts, telling us when we’re wrong, and tipping one (or ten) back when we see each other in person. Every company is built on relationships, and we at Securosis are very very fortunate to have great relationships with great folks at all levels and functions within the security ecosystem. I wake up some days and pinch myself that I get to pontificate all day, every day. Yup, that calls for a celebration. It must be beer o’clock somewhere. From all of us at Securosis, have a great holiday, be safe, and we’ll see you in 2013. –Mike Photo credits: Celebrate You – Celebrate Life! originally uploaded by Keith Davenport Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, where you can get all our content in its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Building an Early Warning System Deploying the EWS Determining Urgency Understanding and Selecting an Enterprise Key Manager Management Features Newly Published Papers Implementing and Managing Patch and Configuration Management Defending Against Denial of Service Attacks Securing Big Data: Security Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance Incite 4 U Title fail: I got pretty excited – any article called “Information Security as a Business Enabler” is bound to give me fodder to lampoon for hours. I mean, a business enabler? C’mon, man! Normally security is a business disabler. I remember trying to position digital certificates as an enabler of new business processes back in the day, and getting laughed out of the customer’s office. So you can imagine how disappointed I was to see the article is really about doing an impact analysis and post-mortem after a breach. I mean, the article is solid and makes points we have been talking about for years. But how this has anything to do with business enablement is beyond me. So some editor is either trolling for views or didn’t read the article. Either way it’s title FAIL. – MR HP contracts small guy syndrome: In last week’s Incite, both Mike and I commented on Gartner’s criticism of Amazon’s and HP’s service level agreements (SLAs) for their respective clouds. Lo and behold, HP responded with an amusing blog post this week. Remember that the only real cloud security controls you have are those guarantee in the contract, so it’s amusing that HP first felt the need to ‘educate’ us all on what an

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