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Tuesday, March 04, 2008 5:38 PM/EST
My colleague Michael Vizard covered Cisco's announcement of the ASR 1000 at CeBIT. I'm anxious to get a look at Cisco's new ASR 1000 Series Aggregation Services Router with Cisco IOS XE. The platform is supposed to be able to offer high availability for IPsec VPN, firewall services, NetFlow event logging, and DDoS detection and mitigation without stopping. Like I said, very interesting and I'm looking forward to getting a look at the device. In the meantime, poking around on Cisco's site yielded this gem for IT managers: a significant change in Cisco's maintenance policy for IOS XE. In the Cisco IOS XE Software End-of-Life Strategy document Cisco will start releasing IOS XE software every four months instead of waiting for a feature queue to fill as is the case for IOS. The good news is that this means network managers will be able to schedule maintenance on a predictable...
Thursday, December 27, 2007 2:06 PM/EST
Today I learned a bit more about the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance from Pinkesh Shah, senior director of product management for policy compliance and risk management. From the conversation I picked up on two important concepts that will likely be a recurring theme for security in 2008. The first is deeper integration of the products that make up McAfee's security suite and more integration through partnerships, which is where the McAfee SIA (Security Innovation Alliance) comes in. The second is security infrastructure consolidation. In 2008 I'm planning on a closer look at McAfee's SIA, which is similar to Check Point's Opsec program. One of the compelling things about an integration program is the obvious benefit of being able to integrate competitive products into the McAfee infrastructure. SIA was launched in Oct. 2007, so the first half of 2008 will be a critical time to watch what happens with the offering....
Thursday, September 20, 2007 4:31 PM/EST
When Network General was reanimated in 2004 I asked "is there life left for Sniffer?" Today, my news colleague Paula Musich reported that NetScout intends to acquire Network General, the once storied leader of packet capture and analysis and creator of the Sniffer product line. From all reports, the entity known as Network General has been going down in price since it was purchased by McAfee in 1997 at the beginning of the dot-com bubble. The long story short is that the combined companies became known as Network Associates, the Oakland Coliseum joined Candlestick Park and the San Francisco baseball stadium in a degrading parade of name changes and today, Network General, again, is no more. Eaten by a much smaller company, matched against fierce competitors and losing value with each pass of the hat, the question now is: can NetScout and Network General effectively join together? You can get...
Monday, March 05, 2007 7:46 PM/EST
Reconnex, maker of data monitoring appliances, today made some news for itself today (March 5, 2007) by announcing the findings of a survey that the company sponsored. Unsurprisingly, the survey showed that of the enterprises surveyed, 1/3 acknowledged the loss of sensitive data in the last 12 months, a problem for which Reconnex (and Vontu, and until recently Port Authority--acquired by Websense in January 2007) has a solution. These kinds of products are becoming more interesting to me because of the highly publicized loss of data at several institutions including the Veterans Administration and UCLA might have been prevented had a data loss product been in use. The basic idea, that data loss tools can be trained to recognize both personally identifiable information and intellectual property seems pretty sound. Creating policies to monitor and enforce appropriate use is a little harder to do. Keeping determined insiders from making off with...
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