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Inverting the IT pyramid

Posted on January 22, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

Whether it is IT outsourcing, business process outsourcing, managed services or utility computing services, any IT service that helps enterprises increase productivity and reduce costs is in demand.

The IT industry has been turned upside down, or inverted, as former technology leaders transform themselves into services leaders, and other companies seek to follow their lead. For instance, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have won the greatest recognition and most significant customer contracts in the utility computing market to date on the strength of their outsourcing and integration capabilities, more than the technical features of their utility computing products.

Technology-centric companies such as EMC and Sun Microsystems are struggling to keep pace in the utility computing market, and have recently begun to shift their business models to emphasize their services as much as their products.

Many organizations are frustrated with the inefficiencies of their current IT operations and concerned about buying more technology and adding more staff to satisfy their business requirements. For many hardware and software technology companies this shift in demand represents a significant challenge.

Even harder than changing the operational processes for many long-standing technology companies is changing the corporate cultures of these places. Many IT companies attempting to restructure their organizations so they can deliver more of their technical capabilities via services are learning how hard it is to invert their business models.

Part of Big Blue’s success has come from internal organizational and cultural changes, and part by acquiring consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Putting services out in front is a dramatic change for the IT industry. Gone are the days when IT installation and maintenance services were slaves to the product side of vendor shops.

As the demand for new technology continues to languish and product differentiation continues to fade, IT services has become a key strategic competitive weapon as well as an essential vehicle for delivering meaningful business solutions.

More info: [url=http://news.com.com/2010-7343_3-5144562.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news]http://news.com.com/2010-7343_3-5144562.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=news[/url]

Issues to address in your incident management policy

Posted on January 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

This article provides tips on what to include in your policy is excerpted from an article on incident management published by their sister publication Information Security magazine.

An effective incident management program must assign responsibilities and specify routine procedures in the event of an incident.

Next, getting down to brass tacks, your computer incident response team (CIRT) policy should specify first responders, responsibility for management of the response to a specific incident, and follow-up and reporting responsibilities.

That’s the mostly-technical first part of a more detailed and comprehensive IMP. Besides the MIS and network technical staff who are first responders, who should be part of the IMP?

At the very least: risk management, corporate legal, corporate security, public relations, human resources and labor relations, the office responsible for regulatory compliance, and all major business units with oversight and advisory responsibility. Further, while initial response in many cases will be technical, IT staff can’t make decisions in a vacuum.

California’s Database Security Breach Notification Act (SB 1386), which went into effect last July, requires companies to inform California customers of incidents involving the compromise of their names in combination with their Social Security, driver’s license or credit card numbers.

More info: [url=http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid14_gci945247,00.html]http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid14_gci945247,00.html[/url]

An IT Manager

Posted on January 21, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

Surveys show that any large organisation lose between 3-5% of their laptops every year.

Relaying laptop theft stories in the local pub is almost as common-place as people boasting how much their houses have shot-up in price over the last two years. However, with an increasingly mobile workforce, often using privately bought mobile devices, the board and IT departments have to take greater notice of who is carrying what around with them and take a rain check of the damage that could be caused if this information was lost and broadcast to the outside world.

[i]One[/i] You must have a mobile Use policy or ensure that your corporate IT security policy has specific provision for mobile devices and you update it whenever you adopt new hardware categories such as combined PDA/phones.
[i]Two[/i] Take the responsibility of IT security away from the end-user and centrally manage and deploy it.
[i]Three[/i] Invest in a solution which is usable and flexible.
[i]Four[/i] Have a blanket approach to security by owning every mobile device that leaves your office and make access control and encryption mandatory.
[i]Five[/i] Be realistic with passwords
[i]Six[/i] Become a realist

Check Point launches dewormer for internal networks

Posted on January 20, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

Nick Lowe, Check Point director for Northern Europe, says his firm’s approach scores over Cisco’s Network Admission Control program by avoiding the need to install client software.

InterSpect appliances are based on Check Point’s Stateful Inspection and Application Intelligence technologies and designed specifically to inspect the protocols and applications used on internal networks.

According to Check Point, InterSpect is better than products designed for perimeter security within Intranet environments because of its greater awareness of internal applications and protocols (such as database protocol SQL).

More info: [url=http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35003.html]http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/35003.html[/url]

Outsourcers need industry savvy

Posted on January 15, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

The outsourcing providers–which included IBM, Accenture, Electronic Data Systems and Hewlett-Packard–are all technically competent, Meta analyst Dean Davison said.

A customer choosing between them should consider factors such as industry-specific knowledge and how their corporate cultures mesh with its own, he suggested.

IBM, Electronic Data Systems, Computer Sciences, Accenture and Science Applications International Corp. all made it into Meta’s category of outsourcing “leader.”

More info: [url=http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5141899.html]http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5141899.html[/url]

Target-based IDS muffles the noise to take aim on the alerts that count

Posted on January 14, 2004December 30, 2021 by admini

Most commercial NIDSes depend on attack signatures to identify malicious or out-of-policy activity. Signature-based NIDS is a very CPU-intensive technology. Before comparing packets against the NIDS database of a thousand or more signatures, the sensors also have to perform a variety of compute-intensive operations such as HTTP normalization, converting URLs in HTTP data streams to a canonical format so that they can be compared against a list of known bad traffic. To keep from losing packets, NIDS signature writers generally only match against the minimum amount of data needed to validate an attack.

Some IDS vendors are working on making their signature and detection engines smarter, but others are taking a different path: target-based IDS. Take additional information about systems and change the signal-to-noise ratio to increase the signal and decrease the noise. You’d still get an alert for an attack packet, but if the attack were simply noise, the alert would be given a low priority.

Early entries in this field include Tenable Network Security’s Lightning Console, Cisco Systems’ Cisco Threat Response (CTR) and Internet Security Systems’ Fusion. These products combine traditional network scanning and vulnerability analysis with IDS alerting consoles. They all take in the raw alerts from your IDS consoles, but they “qualify” each alert based on whether your system is actually vulnerable.

The result: Far fewer alerts and analysis in minutes instead of hours.

This article takes a look at the nature of the beast these new tools are trying to tame.

More info: [url=http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid14_gci944401,00.html]http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/tip/1,289483,sid14_gci944401,00.html[/url]