We have gone from the city that never sleeps to a world that is continuous. That's right, it seems along with the world shrinking, it is always on, someone is always watching or doing. Continuous has become the new black. 

Nowhere is this truer than in IT. We have Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring, continuous this, continuous that, continuous everywhere. Infosec is not immune to this, either. We are trying to protect against continuous attacks by deploying continuous scanning, continuous threat protection, continuous monitoring, all of it part of our continuous security. All of this sounds like an old George Carlin routine. But it's not it; it is the way things are today.

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In my 25+ years in IT, I have seen the outsource/insource pendulum swing back and forth. One of the popular arguments in favor of outsourcing is that it can save an organization dollars in total cost of ownership. In my experience, that is not always the case. But now Forrester has completed a study that says outsourcing Security-as-a-Service could help a company save millions of dollars over a period of three years.

The Forrester study was commissioned by Alert Logic, a managed cloud security firm (full disclosure: I have consulted for Alert Logic, but had no involvement in this study). While the study is specific to Alert Logic solutions around log management, threat management, and web application firewall (WAF), it could just as easily be applied to any MSSP, Security-as-a-Service provider.

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In response to the mind-numbing, never-ending reports of data breaches in the news, I am seeing a distinct move to data encryption as the latest best hope for information security. While encryption is certainly not new and is far from a panacea, the notion that my data is protected even if I am breached or compromised is appealing to many.

Two companies I have spoken with recently are riding this wave in raising VC money and gathering big-name clients. While both are in the encrypted data market and both have Israeli roots, they are actually not very competitive with each other. They play in different areas of the encryption game.

The first company is Secure Islands. Founded by brothers Aki and Yuval Eldar, two veterans of the Israeli tech scene, Secure Islands has a patented and patent-pending group of technologies that make up IQProtector. IQProtector offers Data Immunization, which in the Secure Islands view includes three logical stages:

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A new survey by CA Technologies shows that an eye-popping 88% of more than 1,400 IT or line-of-business executives have already adopted or plan to adopt DevOps within the next five years. This is up from about 66% in a similar survey taken last year.

What is driving this mass adoption of DevOps? The answer is really simple – DevOps is providing benefits. According to the respondents, the benefits they have seen or expect to see break down as follows:

CA

This is a pretty broad set of benefits. Any reasonable person could understand that if this list is accurate, DevOps will indeed find mass adoption in line with the numbers in this survey.

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Few tech companies are as hot right now as Docker. It seems everyone has gone goo-goo over containers. The funny thing is the idea of Linux containers is not really new, nor was Docker the first to use them. But there is no doubt that, true to its logo, Docker has built a whale from a container.

This past week, the company held its first Dockercon in Europe. From what I have heard, it was a standing-room-only crowd and the buzz was pretty loud. Docker put out three different releases on news at Dockercon. 

I will look at each of them, but taken together, the message is clear – Docker has become much more than a container. It is now about running dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of Docker containers at once, across a multi-home, multi-platform environment. How do you interact with these containers with third-party tools and components? Orchestrating multiple Docker containers and the apps contained in them is now possible.

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I spent the early part of last week at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas attending CA World. This was a very different CA World than in the past. It wasn’t just that Magic Johnson and The Fray appeared, it was that CA has a new laser focus on the three key pillars on which they are building their business. All three are built on the back of the “organic engineering team,” which has been built up under the leadership of CEO Mike Gregoire.

Since taking over in 2012, Gregoire has steered CA into a strategy of building the company holistically rather than via acquisition. I had a chance to sit down and speak with Michael one-on-one.  He says his biggest accomplishment is building a “culture of software engineering.”

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There was a time where cloud security was a bit of an oxymoron. But the fact is that the cloud has given the security industry a chance to reimagine and innovate to secure data both in the cloud and on premises. We are seeing sophisticated cloud security suites now that offer Security-as-a-Service and a higher level of security.

We have seen a steady evolution in cloud security from the early days. Initially, it seemed we were merely “cloud washing,” as Rich Mogull of Securosis calls it. That means we were taking older security solutions, moving them to the cloud, and just calling them cloud security. Call them what you will, but those solutions were not cloud security.

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One of the neat things about my role as a consultant to the security industry is that I get to interact with lots of smart people and companies. One of the companies I occasionally consult for is Firemon. Their President/CEO Jody Brazil is one of the sharper people in the infosec space. Last week was a big week for Firemon, as they made two very significant announcements.

The first announcement was an entirely new product that they are calling Policy Optimizer. Firemon is big on descriptive names. But even being descriptive here does not totally cut it. Policy Optimizer is really an automation tool for the rat’s nest that is firewall compliance rules.

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Many of us in the tech industry have suspected for a long time that companies that have great IT departments perform a lot better in this technology-dependent world we live in. But I was unaware if anyone had ever done any research into how high-functioning IT translated to the bottom line. The latest Puppet Labs survey does just this. As a result, don’t be surprised if Kramer doesn’t start advising investors to monitor IT function.

This year’s survey results represent analysis of more than 9,200 respondents, over twice as many as last year. Also, for those in the enterprise who aren’t ready for the DevOps space, 42% of respondents were from organizations with more than 500 employees. Fully 15% had more than 10,000 employees. To be sure, the survey results are still skewed towards technology and web companies, which represent 33% or so of the respondents. That being said, it still leaves the majority of companies participating as non-tech companies.

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There has been quite a bit of controversy lately over an article in the Wall Street Journal about whether or not DevOps was viable for enterprises. After spending a few days here in Orlando at the IBM Innovate conference, I can tell you that DevOps is very much alive and viable in even the largest enterprises.

Actually, no one doubted that certain enterprises were thriving using a DevOps IT philosophy. The so-called unicorns (not sure if my friend Gene Kim coined the phrase, but he certainly has popularized it) like Google, Facebook and Twitter have massive IT infrastructures that are being continuously updated have used DevOps as a competitive advantage. In fact, without DevOps some doubt these companies could function at the high level they do. But beyond the unicorns, what about the horses (again as Gene calls them)?

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At this past year's RSA Conference, I was the moderator on a panel about "Security Metrics: What matters?" One of the participants was my friend Jody Brazil, President of Firemon. Jody referenced a new survey that Firemon had partnered with the Ponemon Institutue about security metrics and the interaction between security teams and executives.

The full survey was just released last week. Without even getting into what metrics you should measure and what you should report, the survey shows some startling findings around how security admins and the executive team interact (or at least how they perceive each other to interact) or maybe how they don't interact.

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I first became aware of Masergy back in the early part of the last decade. Since that time they have grown into a network services powerhouse offering a wide range of network services to a global enterprise clientele. Their lineup includes managed solutions with fully integrated real-time analytics, global unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and software-defined network control. Now, with theacquisition of Global DataGuard, Inc., Masergy has added managed security services to the mix.

If you have not heard of Masergy before, they have become a powerhouse in global cloud networking. What is Global Cloud Networking? Good question. I know it sounds a little like marketing speak. What it means, though, is that basically today's larger enterprises have far-flung assets throughout the globe. With offices in different locations, infrastructure hosted in multiple data centers, employees, partners and customers worldwide, it takes a global provider like Masergy to connect all of the pieces and make there their connectivity is as efficient as possible.

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For just about as long as I have been in technology, when I spoke to engineers about having a specific task run on schedule I was told that we could "run a cron job" to make it happen.  Over the years I realized that sys admins and engineers had a love/hate relationship with cron. It was a simple way of running repetitive tasks over and over again on a schedule, but it was just too simple. Cron didn't give you the insight and GUI to actually manage all of these tasks, follow up to see if they were successful, change them from server to server, etc.  It was good and easy, but not good enough. I always wondered when something better would come along.  Now all of these years later JumpCloud has delivered a better cron.

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I was reading ComputerWorld's Preston Gralla's article on Microsoft Office whipping Google Docs. I just don't see it. While I agree that you can't compare the feature set of power tools that MS Office gives you compared to the utilitarian features from Google, I don't know if I would say the game is over quite yet.

Let me say from the outset that I actually prefer MS Office to Google Docs, hands down. For my part, I really do wish it was over. I don't like editing in Google Docs and for anything other than simple Word or very simple spreadsheets, it's just a web-based notepad. 

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