Microsoft has announced the beta release of something called Microsoft Codename “Atlanta”, which is being described as a “Cloud-Based SQL Server Monitoring tool”. Atlanta is deployed as an agent that embeds into SQL Server 2008 databases and sends telemetry information back to the Microsoft ‘cloud’ on your behalf. This data is analyzed and compared against a set of configuration policies, generating alerts when Microsoft discovers database misconfiguration.
A long time ago I tried to be one of those Quicken folks who track all their income and spending. I loved all the pretty spreadsheets, but given my income at the time it was more depressing than useful. I don’t need a bar graph to tell me that I’m out of beer money.
Action and reaction. They have been the way of the world since olden times, and it looks like they will continue ad infinitum. Certainly they are the way of information security practice. We all make our living from the action/reaction cycle, so I guess I shouldn’t bitch too much. But it’s just wrong, though we seem powerless to stop it.
Okay, your incident response process is in place, you have a team, and you are hanging out in the security operations center, watching for Bad Things to happen. Then, surprise surprise, an alert triggers: what’s next?
November already. Time to clean up the house before seasonal guests arrive. Part of my list of tasks is throwing away magazines. Lots of magazines. For whatever perverse reason, I got free subscriptions to all sorts of security and technology magazines. CIO Insight. Baseline. CSO. Information Week. Dr. Dobbs. Computer XYZ and whatever else was available. They are sitting around unread so it’s time to get rid of them. While I was at it I got rid of all the virtual subscriptions to electronic…
I was pleased to see the next version of the Center for Internet Security’s Consensus Security Metrics earlier this week. Even after some groundbreaking work in this area in terms of building a metrics program and visualizing the data, most practitioners still can’t answer the simple question: “How good are you at security?”
Guess what? Back in September we promised to release both the full Data Security Survey results and the raw data, and today is the day.
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Last week I was in Toronto, speaking at the SecTor conference. My remote hypnotic trance must have worked, because they gave me a lunch keynote and let me loose on a crowd of a couple hundred Canucks stuffing their faces. Of course, not having anything interesting to say myself, I hijacked one of Rich’s presentations called “Involuntary Case Studies in Data Breaches.” It’s basically a great history of data breaches, including some data about what went wrong and what folks are doing now. The…
10 years since the creation of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Paul Krill of Developer World asks: Did it deliver? Unfortunately I don’t think he adequately answered the question in his article. So let me say that the answer is an emphatic “Yes”, as it has provided several templates and tools for solving problems with people and process. And it has to be judged a success because it has provided a means to conquer problems other development methodologies could not.