Cisco Moves to the Next Generation with its ASA CX Firewall

We all know that the bad guys are getting more sophisticated and determined to invade business networks. The first week of 2013 started out with a bang: a series of well-publicized Java exploits, watering hole campaigns, and denial of service attacks – and that was just business as usual for the modern cyber-crook.

Enterprise network managers have to fight these exploits with better tools, and one ray of hope is a new context-aware firewall from Cisco called ASA CX. I tested one of their midrange ASA-5525-X devices this month and came away impressed. Overall, Cisco has done a superior job at its next generation of firewall technology. The user interface of the Prime Security Manager is, well, prime and one of the best pieces of software I have seen from them, and the features are on par if not better than what their competitors offer.

Here is my report.

There is also an accompanying video screencast review where you can see the firewall in action.

CloudSigma and its Flexible, Elastic and Transparent Public Cloud IaaS

Choosing from one of more than a dozen different Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers (IaaS) can be tiresome. Pricing comparisons are difficult, figuring out features isn’t always obvious, and understanding their limitations can be vexing and require a great deal of time and research. But if you are looking for a capable cloud provider that lets you have a lot of flexibility, is transparent when it comes to cost calculations, and comes with ability to support many different virtual machine (VM) configurations, then you should consider CloudSigma’s solution.

I take a closer look at what CloudSigma offers in this white paper that is published here.

Why You Need to Move Your Clients to a Modern Content Management System

Providing your clients with an outdated CMS is like locking them, their brand and their customers, in a time warp. Not all CMSs have moved with us. Those that haven’t are overtaxed, trying to manage information in formats they weren’t created to handle and in a volume few could have anticipated when the outdated CMSs originally launched. So how to move to a more modern CMS?

You can read my Sitecore_WhitePaper here for Redmond Channel Partner.

GigaOm Pro: Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

While computing in the cloud can cost less than running servers in your enterprise data center, the question of how much less isn’t an easy one to answer. The issue has gotten more complex, as Amazon and others have dozens of different cloud services available.

In this research note, we look at some of the current challenges of calculating cloud costs when using services from the major Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors, some of the more important pricing issues to understand, noteworthy third-party vendors to watch, and our predictions for the future.

You can view and download (with registration) the full report here.

Whitepaper: Adventures in Secure Email

Sending and receiving encrypted email with sensitive data should be a lot easier to do. But it ends up being something painful, and as a result we tend to avoid this protection. Haven’t we all been schooled that sending emails in plain text is like having a post card plastered to the wall of your local coffee bar? Haven’t all the various exploits with stolen credit cards and hackers breaking into various Web-based email services been warning enough? Apparently not.

Oddly, this summer marks the eleventh year anniversary of identity-based message encryption with more than a billion secure messages being exchanged annually. But that still pales in comparison to the many insecure messages containing sensitive data being exchanged in the clear. You can read my whitepaper that I prepared for Voltage Security here.

Securing the iPad in the Enterprise

It is one of the Internet’s extreme ironies: you can search for just about anything, but can’t always find what you are looking for. The same can be said when it comes to keeping track of your corporate documents. While you might think they are secured behind your firewalls and other protective hardware, chances are every day you are leaking data in multiple directions.  And as more user-owned devices such as tablets and smartphones appear on your corporate network, finding out where your mission-critical files reside is getting harder and harder.

You can register and download the white paper that I did for ionGrid here, where I talk about solutions to manage user devices on the corporate network.

Why You Shouldn’t Email Sensitive Corporate Documents

E-mail traverses the public Internet in plain text, and can be easily copied or intercepted. Just ask the Gmail users famously hacked in 2010 and again in 2011, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which had at least six weeks worth of e-mail data containing sensitive information stolen in a breach that was widely reported in December 2011.

Today, as increasing global competition drives the need for increasing inter-enterprise collaboration, the use of e-mail to share collaborative information with partners and geographically dispersed team members creates unacceptable security, compliance, and information governance risks. If your users are collaborating on a sensitive project and sharing a confidential document or data, the last thing you want them to do is e-mail it back and forth over the Internet.

I provide some strategies to get around this issue in a white paper that I wrote for Intralinks here.

Whitepaper: Dealing with patch management

Organizations need a comprehensive patch management solution which provides endpoint protection beyond the typical operating system in order to effectively and efficiently minimize risks caused by the vulnerabilities that are inevitable in modern computing systems.

In this paper for white paper for Lumension/Redmond Magazine, I talk about how to manage patching across the enterprise.

Whitepaper: Orchestrating your Disaster Recovery with QuorumLabs onQ

This is my review of QuorumLabs’ onQ recovery appliance that accompanied my video screencast. I go into a bit more depth here about its various features.

Webinar: Integrating Cloud Services Management Into Your IT Operations

Getting into the cloud is a lot easier than understanding how to make it a part of your overall IT operations. In this webinar, I look at ways that you can better govern your cloud deployments and make use of the best practices of IT that you use for your own servers. I will show you more than a dozen different services that can help you understand your cloud computing costs, figure our better ways to make your cloud infrastructure secure, and better manage your cloud deployments.

The webinar is held this Thursday at 12:30 pm ET.

You can register for the webinar here, download the white paper Dec Cloud Integration here, and view the slides that I will use for the event here.