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The No. 1 complaint that I hear from organizations when discussing IT security is that they don't have enough resources to do everything they need to. It's no mystery why: Take an ever-increasing body of regulations and laws we need to comply with, add to it demands of customers and the business, m...
Over the past few years, it seems like there's one technology that almost everyone is deploying: laptop encryption. All over the industry, in nearly every vertical, it seems like everybody has either just deployed, is deploying, or is about to deploy some type of encryption technology to protect la...
Most of us are probably familiar with safe deposit boxes -- you know, the secure storage areas that banks and post offices provide to keep things like jewelry and important documents secure. Even if you've never rented one yourself, chances are you're probably familiar with the concept: a safe place...
Have you ever tried to work when you're really sick? I don't mean a little cough or sniffles. I'm talking about a genuine, drag-out, "can't get out of bed" illness -- the kind where it hurts to stand up, let alone go into the office. I hate to admit it, but I've gone to work in that condition -- you...
Remember the "Scantron" sheets that you had to fill out in school for taking standardized tests -- you know, the ones where you had to fill in the circle with a No. 2 pencil to mark your answer? Now imagine you're watching someone take a standardized math test -- you watch as they spend 15 minutes c...
Well, it's November again -- which means that it's just about time for this year's set of New Year's predictions. Every year around this time, everyone from antimalware companies to analyst firms line up to tell us about the top IT and security trends -- what they are and why we should care. This ...
As a resident of New Hampshire, I can tell you that the Old Man of the Mountain is a very tender topic for Granite Staters. If you've never heard of it, the Old Man is -- or rather was -- a natural rock formation that was the spitting image of an old man's face. It was carved out of granite on the...
Over the holiday weekend, a family friend introduced us to a great concept we hadn't heard before: The concept of "visual yield." It's a concept that I think anybody who's ever been involved in a home improvement project can understand and appreciate -- and it has more to do with information securi...
Imagine for a moment one of your company's employees getting out of their car and arriving at your office building. It doesn't really matter who it is, but for the sake of visualizing the scene more clearly, assume it's someone conservative and maybe a bit socially inept. Maybe it's one of the "su...
Everyone knows the old adage that "out of sight" is "out of mind." There's quite a bit of truth to it. It's a facet of human nature that things that are directly in front of our face get noticed, while things that are out of our scope of awareness don't. Seems pretty obvious, right? In fact, it i...
We all know that some things are easier to do than others. In fact, what separates an average manager from a great one is the ability to balance decisions based on two almost totally unrelated sets of criteria: ease of accomplishment on the one hand vs. value to the organization on the other. Think...
Nowadays, being in IT means dealing with audits -- this is true regardless of whether you do business in a regulated industry, whether you provide service to clients in those industries, or whether your organization has a non-vertical need for an audit. The unfortunate bottom line in today's world: ...
"Vendor security questionnaire" -- three innocuous-sounding words that can leave security folks trembling. If you're in security -- no matter what company you're with -- there's a good chance you know exactly what I'm talking about, either because you've experienced firsthand the pain of trying to v...
Let's face facts: It's a hard economy right now. For those of us in the security business, a down economy hits us harder than most other areas of the business. Not only does our budget wallow in the doldrums just like other areas, but at the same time that we're stuck with less funding, the overall ...
Working hard at being inefficient is not a path to success. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is having the courage to walk away from the "busy work" and take the steps to make that process better. It's a lesson that we in IT -- and particularly in security -- all too often fail ...
Like many kids, I hated mowing the lawn. Also like many kids, I was the go-to guy for lots of family landscaping. The worst lawn to mow of all my relatives was my grandmother's: It was big, it was weedy and rocky, and she still had a push-mower. But the strangest part of mowing her lawn was the nei...
Physicists tell us that only a small percentage of the universe can be seen directly. In fact, the vast majority of the universe is what they call "dark" -- composed of matter and energy that we know is there but that we can't observe, identify or analyze directly. The concept of "dark matter," firs...
Right after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, I bought a used Netra T1. I got it for a song on eBay from a hosting provider that was going under, and for the price, how could I pass it up? Sure, it was unnecessary -- but it was so cheap! I had to have it. At the time that I bought it, I wasn't ...
Folks in IT tend to ask a lot of questions. We're a curious breed by nature. In fact, we have to be. Change comes about so quickly in our industry, technology moves so fast, and our businesses adapt so fluidly that we have to ask questions just to keep up. Some might even say that a healthy curiosi...
Some people say that there's nothing worse than a sour economy. I, for one, don't agree. What could possibly be worse, you ask? Simple: a bad economy in the middle of a budget cycle. Securing funding for technology projects is hard enough nowadays, but IT security projects have it even harder. Try ...
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