Some positive news for Belfast

I'm pleased to see some really strong inward investment in technology and people going into a favourite place of mine, Belfast. I've always liked Belfast - what made it very pleasant for me were my colleages at Sopra, where I worked before founding NIT. Big shout out to Conrad and John and the boys over there ! Brief, but happy days !

TCP flaw exposed by Outpost24 now patched

This article originally appeared on The Register in October, nearly a year ago. Outpost24 one of our partners discovered it. The write up is interesting, but the final quote is one of those very strange sentences that make no logical sense ! "I'm reasonably certain they're absolutely vulnerable." I imagine Juniper won't be happy with that statement though eitherway you try to interpret it !

Silicon Dale

Its good to see Yorkshire based companies doing well.

This caught my eye on the register.

Is Your Medical Information Safe...?

Here's a great article that fully outlines why companies should be deploying laptop encryption within their organisation to protect the information they hold.

You can read this article by clicking here.

This article outlines health information specifically however the principle still applies to everywhere.

They've even highlighted the 10 worst incidents of laptops being lost containing 1,000's upon 1,000's of personal records. You can read who made the 'Lost Laptop Hall of Shame' here.

Why gamble with the chance of you losing a device contaning details of your clients when you can implement a strategy for laptop security and the security of the devices which leave your organisation on a daily basis containing all this sensitive data.

Network Integration can help you implement and manage an encryption solution and we will be more than happy to talk to you about the options you have available.

To find out more about how Network Integration can help you click here.

Femtocell Direct to End Users ?

I'm a big follower of femtocell market developments. If I had a few tens of millions kicking about, this is where I would be investing it....its going to be huge.

NHS Website XSS Blunder

Read this on theregister.co.uk, quit disgusting how a government website is vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting, but when some poor guy tries to help...he gets nowhere and in desperation posts on a forum !

Another USB Stick Goes Missing...

Another news story landed today about another Government organisation who'd lost yet another USB stick which had more personal identifiable information on it, read more about this story here

How many more incidents like this will we hear about before all our personal details are been secured by the companies and organisations we trust our personal information with.

All Government organisations must secure all information they hold on us by encrypting the information held on all their devices. This ensures that if an encrypted device holding our details is lost or stolen the information doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

I believe that all organisaions who transact with the general public should also be implementing strategies for protecting their customers information by using encryption.

Network Integration Technologies LLP can assist any organisation who hasn't yet deployed some kind of strategy for securing the information they hold.

To find out more about how we can help you click here

Swine Flu... Will Employees Abuse Sick Leave When Other's Are Genuinely ILL?

This article landed in my inbox earlier today and it has really got me thinking about what will happen over the coming months leading upto Xmas and the New Year.

NHS Expect Second Wave of Swine Flu

I know it's only Summer now however with the state of things at the moment with the Recession and now Swine Flu expected to come charging in with a second wave of attack later in the year how will organisations cope when their employees start to call in sick ? Will employees take advantage of the situation for a few extra duvet days ?

At the moment most organisations just have to take the strain until their colleagues are feeling well enough to come back to work and catch up however this can lead to a bad service being delivered to customers. Alternatively you could look at deploying a Secure Remote Access solution, as most of your staff will have their own PC or laptop and access to the internet at home and this type of solution would allow your staff to be able to work from home.

Network Integration specialises in deploying Secure Remote Access solutions within organisations of any size and we have accreditations with the markets leading vendors.

For more information on how Network Integration can help your organisation through employees with flexible secure working click here

Network Integration Technologies Day Out at the Formula 2 Championship - Donington Park - Sunday 16th August 2009

The Network Integration team were joined this weekend by some of our loyal customers at the Formula 2 Championship at Donington Park.

Our sponsors Swivel Secure and McAfee provided an opportunity for our clients to find why they are the fastest movers in their game whilst enjoying the days racing!

I think I speak for all those who attended. The motor racing was excellent and we could not have asked for better weather!

Again thank you for coming. We were really pleased that you all enjoyed the day and hope to see you next year at the new home for the British Grand Prix.

Here are few more pics of the days racing:

I like this - how many times have I seen/heard this !

Useful DNS site

I'm forever googling DNS verifications for customers. I found quite a nice simple site today for doing DNS checks

Fibre cut deliberately

Tony Robinson (one of our technical guys at Network Integration) sent me this really good article tonight. It talks about a deliberate fibre cut in NYC that didn't hit the headlines. Its got me thinking its about time I talked about Disaster Recovery and Strategy for Business Continuity on my blog. Its something I've been thinking about, as NIT's strategy always needs tuning as we grow, and our new office move is a good time to review it. watch this space.

http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/

This is Cool

I was looking at the BBC website to get a view of the Budget Speach and I noticed something far less depressing and far more interesting !

This link describes how the BBC test various set-top-boxes and HD kit.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/pressred/2009/04/davinci.shtml

Cloud Computing and How Google Do It

I've been reading up on some newer techniques for cloud, and came across some interesting articles

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/03/25/how-google-routes-around-outages/ - this one talks about how Google handle maintenance and how their data centers 'might' be built (nobody knows for sure as they are so secretive about it)

http://www.zscaler.com/blogs/

This is interesting as it covers some useful questions when it comes to reviewing SAAS vendors.

Groundswell

Mr Hirst and Ms Simey have ordered my own copy of Groundswell, so I've got another read on the go...it looks good, so i'm going home for a read.

I'm doing some long-term strategic work on SAAS Web Security. I've noticed a few new kids in town to compete with Scansafe. This has got to be good for this market. Its going to force the price down and the service up. The market hasn't really changed since Scansafe came along in 1999. Kaspersky and Secure Computing have new services available now, also have a look at http://www.zscaler.com/ http://www.purewire.com/

Email DR Service

Just thought I'd remind you about a service we started to offer after Christmas. Its a very simple bolt-on to Postini which enables you to have access to your email in the event of a DR situation. Let me explain how it works...

In the event that your 'mail server' is off the air because its failed, your Internet connectivity has failed, or your building is now a pile of rubble, then Postini 'spools' your email in the cloud. That is something Postini has done since Day 1.

But, what if you want to get 'at' your email in between your DR plan kicking in, and your mail server being available again ? Easy, we now have another cloud based service that we use for customers to temporarily use for access to their email. What we do is release the email from postini and send it to our 'holding' service. You can then access it, read it, forward the email reply to email etc, just by using a web browser, like any other webmail. Only downside is, that you need a seperate email password to your regular LAN password, but thats no big deal.

Its very cheap, and like I say is designed to be a stop-gap - between invoking full DR and your mail server going down.

AV Companies Compromised This Week

This bit of news caught my eye this week. I can't help but feel this is all very avoidable, especially for a security vendor. Web Application Firewalls which sanity check web input value and data have been around for years now to prevent SQL injection attacks. We've sold them since 2005 ! Cheaper than a code review any day of the week...and a bit quicker to implement...imagine all of those scared techies at 'not so F-Secure' and Kaspersky running around. Maybe this is just the start of a trend along the lines of 'laptops and memory sticks' on trains...and then follow up emails from disk/media encryption vendors saying 'told you so' :-(

Email Message Security Gartner

We've recently been working closely with Paul Barker and Amanda Holt at Exclusive Networks, and they introduced me to Proofpoint. This is a Google competitor and well regarded by Gartner. Its not as cheap as Postini, and doesn't support Lotus Domino Archiving, but its still very good. Its interesting to see Mimecast don't even appear on the quadrant. There's quite a few vendors in this space now and we represent a few of them, Postini, Symantec, Proofpoint, Cisco, Clearswift, Secure Computing, Sophos, Websense and Marshal. Its interesting how most of them now have a 'cloud' based solution of some kind. The software and appliance solutions really aren't the first choice anymore that they were 5-7 years ago.

New Offices ?

It looks like we are going to move offices this year. Growth of Network Integration coupled with wanting some space that is even smarter than we are already lucky enough to have ! means we are looking at buying or moving out of our current home. Anita is on the case and has got a good shortlist. This should happen around May this year.

Thought for the day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem

Messagelabs - Disturbing Contract Pattern Emerging ?

Over the last few weeks and months we've been talking to Messagelabs cutomers about moving over to Postini/Google. This is nothing new. All customers are looking to save money at the moment regardless of their size. What is interesting though, is that we have seen now instances of four different customers, (all different sizes) who have bought both direct from Messagelabs (ML) and partners. When customers have tried to give notice to ML, they have found this difficult, (impossible) to leave them. ML have a very tight contract in place which stipulates 90 days notice..which is fine...except if you miss their window of 'notice', and don't put it in writing, to th right person/department on the right dates, then you find yourself automatically renewed for another year and there's nothing the customer can do about it. Just continue to wait another year. Now I wouldn't mind if this was out in the open, but how many ML customers ever read the contract they signed, or can even find it now ! Postini has massively undercut this market in the last 2 years, and Google buying them only seeks to re-inforce their credibility as the biggest player in the world...heck even Symantec had to buy number 2 vendor for a change ! Just look at the effect Google Apps has had on Microsoft ! Customers know they have a choice and the market is competitive. We know that any of the Postini competitors can't get even close on features and price. Mimecast, Websense, ML, none of them get close on price to Postini. Oh, and Postini have a nice and simple 14 day notice period once you have been with them for a year. Why can't Messagelabs do this ? What are they frightened of ? Maybe Symantec will bring some sense to this worrying situation before their investment in ML is eroded by Postini ?

Do small companies take security seriously ? Apparently not.

I heard from Jonathan this morning that one of the tenants in his building in the centre of Leeds, West One, StickyEyes had been broken into last night. Our Sales Manager saw this as a good opportunity to maybe assist, and when he called them, their director Stephen Lee said "Security is of no interest to me", why said Oliver ? "It just isn't" he said and promptly put the phone down. Oh well, maybe StickyEyes customers and partners also aren't interested in security as well.

Cloud Computing

I've been writing a proposal for a new customer specifically looking at how Cloud Computing can help improve their business efficiency and help (not hinder) their long term growth. Its actually an interesting exercise, as I hadn't realised how far we've come as an industry since the early days of Postini and Eroom in 1999, to today where so many of the services we sell (well nearly all of them !) have cloud elements or alternatives to tin and software on customer premises. Its been actually interesting to see how our portfolio has tracked these changes in the last 3 years to keep ahead of this change in the market. I might add that we are now able to sell Google Apps, as well as Postini, which is our course where we've seen a lot of interest this year.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Firewalls November 2008

We' ve been looking at the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant in the office this last few days as we have a few customers looking at new firewalls. We've been selling the three market leaders for some time now, Checkpoint, Cisco and Juniper. We don't consider the others left in the market as being very serious offerings and view them as second division vendors and products, (this would include the Fortinet, and Astaro and Sonicwall) in fact I wouldn't use any of those on my own broadband at home ! They might be cheap, but they aren't particularly cheerful ! Why an enterprise customer would want to risk cutting corners with them is beyond me really. As my Dad used to say, "use the right tool for the job, and don't buy cheap tools". The sad part about it is a lot of customers are simply buying on price at the moment, and aren't looking into the bigger picture of this kind of purchase, e.g long term support, quality of support, ease of use, integration with the rest of their estate, are they 'best of breed ?'. Enterprise Network Firewalls aren't quite a commodity yet, but the buying of them shouldn't be treated in the same way you buy a laptop and PC....on price.

I'm currently looking for one technical pre and post sales resource and one sales person. If you live in the Yorkshire area and are currently looking for a new challenge then please get in touch with me. You will need commercial and technical experience of the types of services and products we offer. See http://www.networkintegration.co.uk for more info on what we do.

See my profile on Linkedin.com

http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=2495900&trk=tab_pro

There you go, I've set it up Jonathan !

Jonathan Hirst recommended I started a blog at the last partners meeting.