That new startup smell.
There’s a certain kind of smell I love: the smell of a new building, with the paint and the polished wood and new carpeting. It usually gets concentrated best in these small office parks where the buildings look like two-story cottages. It reminds me of the startups I used to be in. Ah, those were the days ...
Speaking only tangentially of startups, Chris Harrington makes a good point I’ve noticed myself. Not only do I have trouble differentiating vendors’ products, they have trouble differentiating themselves. I spent some time quizzing a SIEM vendor rep, and every time he said, “We’re the only ones who do X,“ I’d sweetly name some other vendors who were also doing the same thing. Why aren’t they doing their homework and at least reading their competitors’ brochures?
Next up on This Old App: building generalized algorithms for user enrollment business rules.
UPDATE: Whatever Amrit’s on, I’ve got to make sure he gets more of it.
Nobody understands us, the executives seem to ignore security, the business owners want to focus on profits or other nonsense completely irrelevant to the seasoned IT security professional, the users seem oblivious to the malware laden websites dripping with fresh bot-infected, backdoor, keyword snarfing doodoo, and some jackass from a fortune 100 tech firm has convinced upper management that driving a CMDB across an ITIL landscape will allow us to ride atop a mighty horse of SLA metric goodness to the forbidden city of IT nirvana where operational efficiencies coalesce with the zenith of perfect security – breath[e] it in friends!
I’m just trying to picture Andrew Jaquith jousting atop a “mighty horse of SLA metric goodness,“ with Alex Hutton hauling in the powerful and terrifying FAIR Trebuchet.
on 05/31 at 03:56 PM:
on 05/31 at 04:01 PM:
However, your point is a good one. MARS provided something we really needed: log consolidation, basic analysis and some custom reporting for a very reasonable price. The particular organization had no need to be compliant to any of the big frameworks (SOX, PCI DSS, etc.) so the audit functionality didn’t have to be all that elaborate. Combined with the fact that this client ran an almost 100% Cisco operation with relatively simple Windows servers, Cisco MARS fitted the bill.
Sounds familiar. I was in a SIEM product selection track, which ended in selecting Cisco’s MARS. When we informed the other shortlisted vendors, a major one (Gartner Magic Quadrant, top-right) wasn’t even aware of Cisco being a player in that market. Come on? Hello! Cisco has 7500 units sold and is getting more and more leverage. How can you miss something like that?