One of the great things about Twitter and iChat is their ability to fuel the rumor mill. The back-office chatter for the last couple months, both within and outside Securosis, has been about rumors of HP buying Fortify Software. So we weren’t surprised when HP announced this morning that they are acquiring Fortify Software for an “undisclosed sum.” Well, not publicly disclosed anyway. In our best KGB voice, “Ve have vays of making dem talk.” And talk they did.
To wrap up our Understanding and Selecting a Tokenization Solution series, we now focus on the selection criteria. If you are looking at tokenization we can assume you want to reduce the exposure of sensitive data while saving some money by reducing security requirements across your IT operation. While we don’t want to oversimplify the complexity of tokenization, the selection process itself is fairly straightforward. Ultimately there are just a handful of questions you need to address: Does…
A couple days ago I was talking with the masters swim coach I’ve started working with (so I will, you know, drown less) and we got to that part of the relationship where I had to tell him what I do for a living.
We are ridiculously excited to announce that Gunnar Peterson is the newest member of Securosis, joining us as a Contributing Analyst. For those who don’t remember, our Contributor program is our way of getting to work with extremely awesome people without asking them to quit their day jobs (contributors are full members of the team and covered under our existing contracts/NDAs, but aren’t full time). Gunnar joins David Mortman and officially doubles our Contributing Analyst team.
Identity and access management are generally 1) staffed out of the same IT department, 2) sold in vendor suites, and 3) covered by the same analysts. So this naturally lumps them together in people’s minds. However, their capabilities are quite different. Even though identity and access management capabilities are frequently bought as a package, what identity management and access management offer an enterprise are quite distinct. More importantly, successfully implementing and operating these…
The Boss is a saint. Besides putting up with me every day, she recently reconnected with a former student of hers. She taught him in 5th grade and now the kid is 23. He hasn’t had the opportunities that I (or the Boss) had, and she is working with him to help define what he wants to do with his life and the best way to get there. This started me thinking about my own perspectives on goals and achievement.
Continuing our thread on commoditization, I want to extend some of Rich’s thoughts on commoditization and apply them to back-office data center products. In all honesty I did not want to write this post, as I thought it was more of a philosophical FireStarter with little value to end users. But as I thought about it I realized that some of these concepts might help people make better buying decisions, especially the “we need to solve this security problem right now!” crowd.
Not every use case for tokenization involves PCI-DSS. There are equally compelling implementation options, several for personally identifiable information, that illustrate different ways to deploy token services. Here we will describe how tokens are used to replace Social Security numbbers in human resources applications. These services must protect the SSN during normal use by employees and third party service providers, while still offering authorized access for Human Resources personnel, as…
Following up on Rich’s FireStarter on Security Commoditization earlier today, I’m going to apply a number of these concepts to the network security space. As Rich mentioned innovation brings copycats, and with network-based application control we have seen them come out of the woodwork.
This is the first in a series we will be posting this week on security markets. In the rest of this series we will look at individual markets, and discuss how these forces work to help with buying decisions.