My next podcast for Ziff’s IT Link/eWeek is with Chander Kant, the CEO of Zmanda. We talk about the importance of open source standards for data protection, and the role it plays with enterprise backups.You can download the podcast here.
My next podcast for Ziff’s IT Link and eWeek is with Rich Bader, the CEO of EasyStreet Online Services from Portland, Ore. We talk about what it takes to build a more green data center, and some of the issues that he has uncovered in the process of expanding his services.You can download the podcast here.
My next podcast for Ziff’s ITLink community is with David Goodman, the Chief Technology Officer of the International Rescue Committee in New York City. We talk about the unique challenges of supporting third world IT shops and mention some of his experiences, which he blogs here.
Robert Packer, Security Practice Manager for Presidio Networked Solutions in New York City, talking about the key threats for small business security and ways that VARs can become smarter about the SMB space.
You can listen to the podcast, for Ziff’s IT Link site, here.
For those of you that are parents, have you ever considered how keeping our networks secure is a lot like trying to provide tough love to our children? When we are raising our kids, knowing when to say no is one of the hardest things we have to do. We also have to let our kids make their own mistakes, and when they do how they have to face the consequences. Finally, blended families through remarriage have their own special issues. (My thanks to my friend Carol for the original idea.)
Now, let’s consider what this means for us as network and IT professionals. Learning how to say no is understanding how to block the wrong kinds of traffic entering our networks, such as malware and viruses. And today’s threats are also coming over Instant Messaging and peer-to-peer connections, so there is that to consider. It is always tough to say no to your kids, and your users, and even harder when your users always want to hear yes when we are saying no, too.
Learning from our users mistakes is also particularly difficult. We have to review our firewall and access logs and make sure that network exploits haven’t happened on our watch. Part of this is also understanding when we don’t have sufficient resources for this kind of monitoring and being able to make a case to outsource this function so that we can spend our time elsewhere.
Part of tough love parenting is teaching our kids how to face consequences of their actions, and part of our jobs as networking professionals is showing our management the consequences of their actions too. If our firewalls and other protective gear is outdated, that decision will have certain consequences. If our desktops are more than five years old and haven’t been patched with the latest protection, that will have consequences too. If we have deployed virtualization without careful analysis, that will ripple across the data center when there are problems.
Finally, there are the special issues that blended families and step-children bring to the table, and that has its analogs with how mergers and acquisitions play out in the corporate world. What if my newly acquired subsidiary is running Juniper and I am a Cisco shop? Or if they outsource all their Web servers and I still run them inside my data center? Or if I have been using a smaller vendor that is now bought by HP or Cisco or Oracle, just to name a few companies that have been on buying binges as of late?
How does this translate for our daily interactions with our users? Part of being a great parent is being able to listen to the subtext, and understand what your kids are really saying to you when they ask you questions. The same can be said for our users. I remember one of mine from the middle 1980s who didn’t like any of my suggestions for how to use his PC. What he really was telling me is that he wanted to make his own mistakes, and learn from the experience. Of course, he formatted his disk and wiped out his data along the way to learning how not to do that, and I had to hold my tongue.
Another facet of IT-by-parenting is understanding that security-by-obscurity is not going to work. On the Internet, especially today’s Facebook-Twitter-always-in-your-face Web 2.0 version, everyone knows your business, and even your personal life too. You need a plan, and you need to protect your networks accordingly.
Yes, being able to provide tough love is, well, tough. If you want to hear more about this, it coincidentally is the topic of a speech that I am giving on Thursday at the Sonicwall sales conference in San Francisco. If you can’t make it, I can bring this talk to your meeting and customize it for your audience, too.
My next podcast is with Gregg Kalman, the VP for channels for wireless vendor Meru networks. We talk about some of their challenges and channel strategies and the impact of 802.11n networks on their customers and how to deal with managing lots of “carpet space”.You can download the podcast here.
David O’Berry, IT Manager with the State of South Carolina government, talks about his hot button topics for 2008, where he thinks endpoint security is headed, and how VARs can realign themselves to take advantage of the changing threat landscape.You can listen to this podcast for Ziff’s IT Link, here.
For the technical special interest group of the New York Society of Association Executives, I am doing a Webinar on 9 January called, “Help! I’ve been hacked, now what?” The seminar talks about some practical options for protecting desktops, what your corporate liability is in preventing data leaks, how to learn from security mishaps and other mistakes, and where you can go for help in hardening your network from future attacks. You can download the slides here. (The seminar is a members-only invitation, sorry!)
In this Channel Chat: E-waste is a growing problem, and a growing business for some companies. Jake Player, president of Tech Turn, talks about how VARs can generate an income stream from asset recovery and equipment retirement. Listen to the podcast on eWeek’s ITLink site here.
Mike Adams, Director of Storage and Backup Solutions for Lighthouse Computer Services, talks about what makes for a good vendor partner in the storage and virtualization space, and how to succeed in the channel selling these kinds of solutions, in this Channel Chat podcast for Ziff’s IT Link community site.