Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

Through some of the work that I do for my Clients, I’ve helped to identify and reduce Shadow IT as a part of better aligning IT delivery with strategic business goals.  It has been sort of a mantra, that Shadow IT is a bad thing and must be eliminated.  Over the past couple of years [...]

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I was having a drink with an old friend of mine, who is a very prominent and globally sought after risk management professional, and we got around to talking about Disaster Recovery Planning Software.  I asked him, “have you ever found one of those that you like?”  His response was not positive. Quite often, I [...]

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This morning I was reading a short piece by Gary Beach, Publisher Emeritus of CIO Magazine in which he asks if he’s “certifiably nuts” for encouraging broad-based, state-administered technology certification programs.  The short answer from me- no, not really.   I would though, like to support the spirit of Gary’s call with my own encouragement.

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Undoubtedly you’ve heard by now that Intel has a bid on the table to buy McAfee (for $7.7B). ¬†We’ve written before about the collaboration that’s been going on between the two companies for almost two years now, which we suspect is a leveraging of features at both ends of the stack to improve security of [...]

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As someone with a strong operational ethic, one of my pet peeves is the colo site that resembles a monthly self-storage facility.¬† I’m referring here, to allowing (or tolerating) tenants storing boxes, material, and debris in their cages. A colocation facility that has cardboard and other such material in customer cages shows very poorly.¬† That [...]

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In my classes at the university, I sometimes give students a project to create a malware pet shop or malware zoo.¬† The purpose is to make the students more aware of the “biodiversity” that really exists out there in the malware world.¬† We also often talk about the increasing use of malware and other network-based [...]

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In my IS Security class at the university, I was recently moderating a discussion thread where my students posted their opinions on Internet content filtering. The question was a simple one, “Some schools and libraries use Internet content filters to prohibit users from accessing undesirable Web sites. These filters are designed to protect individuals, yet [...]

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Confusion Persists Through several posts on this blog, we discussed the many aspects of confusion around the term, “Cloud Computing.”¬† After attending this year’s Cloud Expo in New York City and seeing the same three-layer stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) slide in fifty half of the presentations, I have to conclude that confusion still exists in [...]

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We’ve just wrapped up day-one of this year’s Cloud Expo at the Javits Convention Center in New York City.¬† You know, it’s been nearly a year since I attended Cloud World in San Francisco, and over that period of time it surprises me how little new anyone is saying about cloud computing.¬† It borders on [...]

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As I’ve watched the momentum of the Cloud, it’s caused me to reflect upon earlier discussions about data center physical security.  It’s long been my opinion that physical security will soon emerge (or re-emerge) as a top issue in data center planning, since businesses and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on the data and transaction [...]

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