Daily Network Monitor

It’s like having your cake and eating it too. WhatsUp Gold earned a sweet first-place rank in CRN’s Network Management Solution Bake-Off, beating out solutions from Ad Rem and Solar Winds. It’s gratifying to see the WUG team’s hard work recognized not only for creating great technology but also for making the product so channel-friendly. The reviewer pointed out WhatsUp’s features and the benefits of Ipswitch’s partner program.

The application offers an intuitive interface and a high level of customization for its features. WhatsUp Gold Premium combines many network-management features and trending databases with extensive packet intelligence, supporting SNMP 1/2/3 and WMI devices.

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There’s no fee to join Ipswitch’s three-tier partner program, but it requires an annual revenue commitment and technical certification. Ipswitch gives leads to partners and offers pre-sales, post-sales and technical support.

The test center setup was a great simulation of a typical SMB network, with one Microsoft and four Linux servers running web, email, firewall and SQL server running on them, two workstations, two Cisco switches and an HP printer. Just to jazz things up, the engineers added an Apple MacBook to the environment partway through the test. These kinds of dynamic, heterogeneous networks are more and more common in businesses of all sizes. In these days of consolidation in the IT press, it’s good to see that CRN still takes the time to do thorough, real-world testing.

I have been out on the road the past few weeks but I am glad to be back. I was reading about the latest data theft at Boeing today. A disgruntled employee with the intent of hurting his employer placed sensitive data on a thumb drive with the hopes of leaking it to a local Seattle newspaper. As you probably guessed, this man is unlikely to receive any employee awards or merits. What really caught my eye in this story was the ‘potential’ financial impact had the newspaper not done what is right – a whopping $5-$15 billion loss was possible. If you’re like me, your wondering what the heck the data said? Did it unveil the material makeup for it new dream liner or was it indicative of bad business practices?

One of my favorite security lecturers is Bruce Schneier. If you ever have the chance to listen or speak with Bruce, you’ll be entertained and well educated by the end. In reviewing this data breach, Schneier bring up valid points of practicality, “If a company hires an untrustworthy employee, there is almost nothing it can do to prevent theft”, Schneier argues. “What’s done in African mines is they do full-body cavity strip searches every time they leave. That works,” Schneier says.

I’ll talk more about USB thumb drives in a future entry but in the meantime, check out RedCannon Security. I can’t validate whether or works yet but these guys caught my eye as a needed innovation in the security space. RedCannon says it can restrict the types of USB drives that are plugged into computers, monitor what data is pulled from a hard drive, and remotely destroy content if the thumb drive is inserted into an Internet-connected computer. As an extra safeguard, RedCannon says its products can set USB devices to stop working when they are not inserted into a computer connected to the Internet