The Daily Network Monitor

I had them all with me tonight – Information Week, CIO, Redmond, eWeek and Network World. Not surprisingly, the world of technology continues to be a world of contradictions and that’s a good thing. Ever since we all witnessed the battles on the airwaves 10 years ago between Cisco (promoting the paperless office) and Xerox and Canon promoting the highest, fastest volume outputs of paper and we in technology took a side that contradicted a colleagues comment or belief – continuing our debates over coffee, beer and long inescapable air flights.

Enter the time machine and here we are 10 + years later and a world of new contradictions.

The jury is still out on SOA. Proponents argue that a distributed, nimble set of web services that replace large monolithic systems is the future. Proponents claim the economies of scale, re-use and distributed network friendly design poses huge benefits for adopters. Yet, the early poll and interview results are uncovering hosts of problems that are frustrating the heck out of CIO and subordinates. Application performance, application reliability and security are all questions and issues in need of a solution.

The jury is in on Virtualization and the ruling looks like guilty for all. We (I) am committed to virtualization like no ones business. Yet, I am reading tonight that the early adopters have already begun to uncover the pitfalls and it would be best to look to third party management companies when deploying a virtualized environment. I cannot say this is a contradiction in pure form but it fits my blog so give me a little break here.

Last, the story that made my night. MIT on Thursday morning will unveil a new working forum whose goal is to expand Kerberos to wireless technologies. Isn’t Kerberos dead? I guess Kerberos really does have 3 heads, I mean lives.

I often debate with friends in the IT industry on the merits of chasing business in the SMB. Lots of friends agree that the growth in the SMB sector continues to be strong but they argue that re-designing existing products for SMB’s has proven to be less than a profitable venture. I disagree with the entire rationale for reasons that might not appear to be obvious.

The reason most ventures have been unprofitable has little to do with the market and more to do with the philosophy of 99.9% of companies who try to push down complexity to SMB’s with new packaging. SMB thrive on easy to use yet effective solutions for complex environments. Vendors who service that market with dedication are profitable. Those that just repackage complexity with a simple title end up failing and end up going back to the enterprise to sell.

When will the vendors learn?

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