The Ashimmy Blog

Webinar: Who Moved the Cheese in Security

Tomorrow, April 23, 2013 at 2pm eastern time my friend Dominique Karg of Alien Vault and I are doing a webinar on “Who Moved the Cheese in Security”.  It should be a lot of fun and I invite everyone to listen in and participate.

This grew out of a conversation Dominique and I had after RSA. It was amazing to us that some security executives actually believed that the Cloud, BYOD and such were passing fads. That soon we would return to traditional networks and traditional security. Talk about putting your head in the sand.

We will discuss that not only has the technology changed but how. We will also discuss how attacks and attack vectors have changed.  Finally what should you do and how is success defined.

It should be a great webinar. If you can make it please do.  If not you will be able to listen in to a recording of the webinar, but of course no live questions.  You can register down below or by going to: http://www.alienvault.com/resource-center/tech-talks/who-moved-the-cheese-in-security

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Microsoft buys Skype, why buy the cow when the milk is free

Image via CrunchBase

The big news today is of course the 8.5 Billion big ones that Microsoft laid out for Skype.  While I love Skype and use it a lot, I am reminded of something my Grandmother used to tell me, “why buy the cow when the milk is free”.

I understand that Steve Ballmer is feeling vulnerable. After all Microsoft is not in the “cool boys club” with Google and Apple. But is going to the mall and spending 8.5 billion dollars going to make you cool? I don’t see how this is going to make Microsoft more relevant?

Everyone uses Skype on computer to computer calls and I bet there are some people who use it as their primary phone option, but 8.5 billion worth? I don’t think so.  This buy just stinks of desperation to me. But what do I know?

Will be interesting to see if we there will be any new Skype clients for iPhone or Android  in the not to distant future though.

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Uh, AT&T DSL – Buh Bye

As much as I hate to admit we are big AT&T users in my house. We use Ma Bell for local and long distance, all of our cell phones, our internet DSL connection and even get a discount on DirecTV with the bundle deal.  I rant and rave mostly about my cell phone service, but on the other stuff, generally they are no better or worse than other providers.

For years we have been getting AT&T “Extreme DSL”.  It was so extreme that I was getting a whopping 1.6 or 1.7 mbps download and about 375 kbps upload speeds all this time. When I would call AT&T and complain they would tell me they would be upgrading soon and would let me know. In the meantime they would lower my fee for DSL, since it really wasn’t worth the $37 dollars a month they were charging me at the time. Eventually they were charging me like 21 or 22 dollars a month for the DSL service.

Since at home we mostly only do email and some web browsing, it really wasn’t critical. But now we have new TVs, wireless Blueray, and on demand video.  The only thing extreme about the AT&T DSL was that it was extremely slow. We could barely watch 720p movies over the net, let alone 1080p.  With both boys on line and occasionally my wife, my web experience was a crawl too. It felt like I was back on dial up.

In spite of all this, I stuck with AT&T. I just didn’t want to bother with a change. That all changed this week when we received the following email from my friends at AT&T:

Dear AT&T Internet Service Customer:

We are updating the AT&T High Speed Internet Terms of Service. We are making these changes to provide greater clarity around the terms of your service and to help us deliver a consistent, high-quality service experience for all of our customers.
We’ve reinforced this notice with additional links providing answers to frequently asked questions. Of course, we are ready and available to answer any questions you may have and to discuss individual account needs or concerns.
Here's a summary of the updates:

•  Introduction Revision: We have added email as a separate service because
    we now offer customers without our high speed Internet service the ability to have
    an att.net email.
•  Changes to this Agreement: We have changed the acceptance provision so that
    you are now deemed to have accepted the changes to the agreement after the
    30 day notice has passed, rather than immediately after receipt.
•  AT&T High Speed Internet Service: We have moved the speed tiers to a link
    within the agreement, www.att.com/speedtiers for easy reference.
•  Service Availability: We have added language to clarify that service is not
    available in all areas, and may not be available at certain speeds (or at all) at
    some locations.
•  Service/Site Changes: We have added language stating that AT&T may need to
    modify or discontinue your service, either temporarily or permanently.
•  Conversion from DSL to U-verse High Speed Internet: We have added
    language to this agreement that will allow us to convert customers from our DSL
    network to the AT&T U-verse High Speed network, where available.
•  Usage: We've added a link at www.att.com/internet-usage where customers can
    go to get information about AT&T's data usage policy and managing their data
    usage.
•  Dial-up Access Options and Toll Charges: We have added language to clarify
    specific charges that may be incurred. Such charges are your responsibility to pay.
•  Collection Agency Fees: We have added language that you are responsible for
    paying collection agency fees AT&T incurs when recovering any money owed to us.
•  Email and Termination or Cancellation of Service: We have added language
    explaining that you will keep your email address if you choose to terminate service.
•  Abusive Treatment: We have added language that allows AT&T to terminate the
    service of customers who repeatedly harass or abuse our employees.
•  Equipment & Software: We have added language to address U-verse equipment
    that is not owned by the customer, and needs to be returned after termination of
    service.
•  Restrictions on Use & Network Management: We have added language
    to make clear that the AT&T Acceptable Use Policy is incorporated into the terms
    of service. Also, to protect our network from harm and to help us ensure a high
    quality Internet experience for all of our customers, we have added language
    about reasonable network management practices that AT&T may adopt. We will
    provide you with advance notice and details if we implement new network
    management practices that directly impact your service.
•  Content: We have added language about mobile data charges for forwarding
    content from the att.net web site to a mobile device.

We encourage you to review the revised terms and acceptable use policy. Please visit:

•  www.att.com/tos2011
•  www.corp.att.com/aup

Please note, that by continuing to use the Service, you are agreeing to the terms and conditions set forth in the Terms of Service document.

When I looked up the bandwidth limits, I saw that if we watched about 10 movies a month, that alone would put us over the bandwidth limits.  The good news was that our connection was so slow it would probably be very tedious to watch 10 movies a month.  But with my kids, it was certainly possible.  I was not about to pay bandwidth overage charges. They were only signing up to deliver about 1.56 mbps to my house and were going to add mobile data charges for forwarding content to a mobile device.

So I went to Comcast, my cable provider. We get basic cable from our HOA. We were eligible for the new Xfinity service. I would get 12 mbps minimum, $19.99 a month for 6 months and then $39.99 a month.  I set up a service call for Friday, but went out and bought my own modem and router (my AT&T DSL modem/router wouldn’t work).

Today I called Comcast, told them I had my own equipment and asked to just plug it in and set it up.  Inside of 15 minutes I was up and running.  My speed tests show me downloading at about 21 mbps, uploading at about 4 mbps.

Everything is all hooked up and working great!

I just hung up with AT&T DSL customer service and told them Buh, BYE.  Maybe they will get a clue.

Related articles

• AT&T will cap DSL and U-Verse internet, impose overage fees (update) (engadget.com)
• Drilling Through the Caps (corp.sonic.net)
• AT&T's U-Verse and DSL Data Caps: Good Deal, Bad Precedent (pcworld.com)
• Understanding the AT&T Takeover of T-Mobile (alternet.org)

Move along pay no attention to that China thing . .

Reading an interview of Marius Haas, GM of HP Networking in Bloomberg Business Week today I was reminded of old Obi Wan in the original Star Wars.  When asked by the reporter whether the close ties of 3Com to the Chinese government might hinder sales of HP Networking gear to western governments and companies (like Google) wary of the Chinese, Marius did his best Jedi mind trick imitation. 

It might have fooled the interviewer, but I don’t think everyone is going to be taken in by the HP Force on this one. The same reasons that freaked people out about China and 3Com before (and for the record I didn’t agree with them then and don’t now) will freak them out now. 

Yes HP might be able to overcome it because they are HP, but they will have some explaining to do.  Having sold to the DoD types before, there will be some element there who will just never believe it. But they are probably big Cisco fans anyway.

Speaking of Cisco, Marius hurls all kind of dirt on Cisco, the long in the tooth profile of Catalyst switches and Cisco’s issues with delivering new products.

Its good to see Haas is eager to mix it up. The HP and Cisco war should be moving into full swing now.

In the meantime, in honor of the HP mind trick . . .

 

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Brocade-McAfee: Me Too or True Love?

Brocade today announced that they have entered into a “strategic relationship” with McAfee. The announcement calls for joint development by both companies to make McAfee’s ePO work with Brocade’s network management tool. There will also be further interoperability between McAfee firewalls, NAC and other network products with Brocade/Foundry’s entire campus line up.

To be perfectly frank, my first reaction was so what. This is hardly McAfee’s first “strategic relationship” with a network infrastructure provider. Previous announcements with HP and Extreme being prime examples. In fact McAfee has made a bit of a reputation over the last two years of announcing strategic relationships, that with hindsight seem more like dressing CEO Dave DeWalt in a purple dinosaur suit.

So I asked the Brocade folks why was this different? Did McAfee just tell them “me love you long time” and whisper some other sweet nothings in their ear? I was told no, absolutely not. There is actual money and resources that both sides have pledged as skin in the game for this one. From high to low, there are multiple points of contact in both organizations that are tasked to making this a success. They are going to make the ePO integration work. 

All of this sounds fine and dandy. Frankly I heard the same things before. The HP ProCurve folks swallowed the same thing. My friends from Extreme Networks were telling me the same things when that deal was announced. Well HP ProCurve went out and bought 3Com and Tipping Point. There went that McAfee strategic deal. Having my own experience with Extreme’s sales channel, I don’t think that deal is on fire either.

Frankly, unless you believe the sweet nothings McAfee is whispering to Brocade here, why should this one be different? . But there are other factors to look at here.

From Brocade’s point of view their research has convinced them that security has become a primary deciding factor in network infrastructure purchases. If they are going to compete with HP, Juniper and Cisco (whose own  security strategy seems adrift recently), they need a strong story on security. Historically, Foundry/Brocade has been a Switzerland when it came to security. They were big supporters of open standards and worked with any security company that supported those same standards. They now realize that that is not a winning strategy. Brocade has to put a stake in the ground if they are going to compete with HP, Juniper and the rest. Brocade is a monster of a company. They have the whole enchilada in terms of infrastructure and the security story is a big hole for them.

McAfee on the other hand, also has real reason to try and make this work. The HP ProCurve story is shot. Tipping Point being the “in house” brand there puts a huge damper on that. Extreme Networks is frankly something of a shambles. Their CEO just left, the numbers are down and they probably need to find a buyer. In the meantime Cisco, Juniper and IBM are breathing down their neck in network security. AV may still be a cash cow, but the days of charging for that are drawing to a close. It is not just Symantec that they have to worry about anymore. They need a big brother to give them the muscle in the datacenter and the entire campus LAN/WAN.

So it is for these reasons that I think McAfee/Brocade may just have to make this work or else. In fact, I think this could be “the start of a beautiful friendship”. It may even be that Dave DeWalt has found his buyer for McAfee. Brocade will be ready to do battle with Cisco, Juniper, HP and the rest having a major security player as their in house brand.

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Is vendor lock-in really a bad thing? Yes!

Lori MacVittie over on the F5 DevCentral blog, has a post today asking if vendor lock-in is really a bad thing. I say absolutely! Anytime you are given less choice, sooner or later it limits your options.  Lori draws a clear distinction in her article between consumer lock-in as with the iPhone for example, versus data center lock-in (which in my mind is Cisco, but could be F5, HP or any number of others.) Putting aside the issue one commenter made about closed platform versus actual lock-in in regards to the iPhone, lets not even bother with consumer stuff for purposes of this response. Lets look at the data center as Lori does.

Lori says its not bad lock-in if the vendor:  (a) does what it says it does, (b) solves all their problems and (c) the company isn’t going anywhere. I agree monolithic vendor solutions can be quite efficient. Hey Mussolini was loved by the Italian people early on because he made the trains run on time.  That didn’t mean that a fascist form of government was best for Italy and that it was not a bad thing. But a single party dictatorship is more efficient than a democracy usually.  Doesn’t make it befter.

What does this have to do with data center vendor lock-in? I think where Lori’s wheels fall off the tracks on this one is when the vendor uses that monopolistic lock-in to ensure that customers now have to use vendors products for ancillary solutions. Imagine if you will (well you don’t have to imagine, it used to be like this) that if you want to use VOIP and your a Cisco shop, unless you use Cisco VOIP phones they just don't work so well on your Cisco network. Take wireless as another example. Aruba gear in a Cisco shop is a real nightmare.  Now does Cisco purposely make it harder for another vendor's gear to work with their switches? I will leave it to you to decide. The real problem as I see it is when does lock-in become so prohibitive that it crosses over to monopolistic. When it does, we don’t live in a world of corporate saints, so you can’t expect them to do what is best for customers and not for themselves.

Lori also points out that standards are so supposed to alleviate some of that angst. But as Lori says that ain’t a panacea either.  Even within standards there is too much “embracing and extending” that renders them greatly diminished.  Try making 802.1x switches from different vendors work together as a great example.

Tufin moves beyond firewall management

Over the last year I have been following two companies in what I called the firewall management space. Secure Passage, whose CEO appeared on the podcast and Tufin Technologies, which I have been getting to know through Liz Safran of Looking Glass PR.  I actually met with the Tufin team at the Gartner Security Summit this past summer up in DC. I was impressed with both companies and think both companies bring a needed solution to market.  Today’s enterprises and MSPs have to be able to manage multiple firewalls from multiple vendors and it has to go beyond just inserting a rule across the board.  One question I had was how each of them would broaden the amount of different firewall solutions they could manage.  Having a product in this category that only did Checkpoint and Juniper, might be OK for a sub-section of the market, but would ultimately limit the opportunity for either of them.

Both companies told me they planned to expand coverage.  Tufin was attempting to do so in a scalable manner by building out a platform that would then make it easier to “plug in” new devices in a rapid manner.  Today they announced that using this Tufin Open Platform (TOP), they have plug ins available for 12 new devices and manufacturers equipment. That in and of itself is cool, good to see them expand.  But what I thought was worthy of writing about was the fact that they are moving beyond firewalls and are  providing security management for switches from most of the leading vendors as well.  This moves them into a whole new market.  The Tufin system has great change management and logging and auditing of what they call security life cycle mangement.  I think the expansion beyond firewalls really positions them to make a move in the market with a great network convergence story.  With so little new in security it seems, I am happy to see a company actually doing something.

The wide, wacky world of Ethernet switching

I have written before that to many the Ethernet switching market is a fairy tale of Cisco and the seven dwarfs, except that these dwarfs really aren’t so little. Companies like HP, Brocade, Nortel, 3Com, Enterasys, Juniper, Force 10 are constantly biting at the heels of the Cisco monolith.

Recently, some of these have actually made solid progress. HP’s ProCurve network gear division claims to be solidly in the 2nd place slot and closing.  Foundry’s merger with Brocade created a viable competitor to Cisco across storage and Ethernet switching. 3Com has actually shown some signs of life recently in the international market.

Today though three articles caught my attention that show that it is still a wide and wacky world in the switch business. First comes word that Ciena is offering $521m for the assets of bankrupt Nortel. Hard to believe that once might Nortel has fallen so far. Next Extreme Networks, which has always had the rep of having great technology was hammered by the markets yesterday after releasing guidance that they will badly miss this quarter. They blamed the shortfall on supply chain problems.  Listening to that you would think they had all of these orders they were unable to fulfill that as a result were pushed our or cancelled.  Maybe that is true, but it just doesn’t seem so to me. I think there might be other issues at play there. Finally, the latest rumors are that Brocade is now shopping themselves and likely buyers are HP or Oracle. A sale to HP would certainly make for a powerhouse. I am not sure what Oracle would do in this market though.  Here is my prediction; look for IBM to get into this market soon.

One thing for sure though is that the constant jockeying for position to take on the still undefeated Cisco will continue.

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3 way battle royal for the data center

I was reading the news yesterday about IBM oem’ing Foundry/Brocade switches. Watching the machinations of companies vying for dominance in this space is like watching continental drift over geologic time periods. It seems the same old masses are in constant motion - combining, breaking up and recombining in infinite configurations. Cisco dominated the data center network infrastructure. HP had servers and storage. IBM competed with HP but dominated in services.  HP buys EDS competes with IBM in services. Cisco makes blade servers, competes with HP. HP heavily promotes its ProCurve line to compete with Cisco.  IBM oem’s Foundry/Brocade, competes with HP and Cisco.  Round and round she goes, where it stops nobody knows. Hey what is Microsoft going to do? As much as it goes around, it seems at the end of the day it is the same old big giants that dominate and are constantly trying to steal each others cheese.

I do know that there are billions of dollars at stake.  With stakes that high, it will be a fight to the finish.  However, sooner or later equilibrium will set in. Every side will find its niche. I don’t think any of these guys are going out of business or anything. In the meantime it could create opportunity too for smaller vendors to run between the legs of these giants and deliver solutions that customers need.  By the same token I am sure that this new jostling will lead to a new round of acquisitions as well.  Same old same old in the tech business!  The faces change, but the names stay the same!

Redheaded stepchild no more

Was happy to see this article in the NY Times Technology section today about HP ProCurve shedding its redheaded stepchild status, at least internally in HP. ProCurve for a long time was one of the best kept secrets in technology.  Operating as a company within a company at HP they very quietly went about their business of building the second leading switch business in the market. Now they are finally getting their due, being acknowledged as the second most profitable division in HP and getting some very high visibility within HP's executive team.

Believe it or not, before Mark Hurd took over, HP's service and sales team was comp'ed to sell Cisco products but not ProCurve!  According to the Times article this may have been due to the fact that Carly Fiorina was on Cisco's board at the same time she was CEO of HP.  In any event ProCurve had to make their own way in the world and may very well be stronger for it.

All of that has apparently been placed in the rear view mirror now.  HP's sales force is being compensated to sell ProCurve.  Hurd and legendary EVP Ann Livermore (in charge of the division ProCurve is now part of within HP) are very much involved and interested in seeing ProCurve grow.  They have thrown down the gauntlet, letting Cisco know that they want a bigger piece of the 20 billion dollar network gear market.

ProCurve has some great products, great warranty and great service.  They also have a good strategy around security in the network.  My friend Mauricio Sanchez drives a lot of the vision around security. I just hope that my friends at ProCurve don't find that having the spotlight turned on them somehow messes with their momentum and way of doing things. Otherwise they may just wish that they were that redheaded kid still.

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