Rational Survivability

You can forget any amount of nicey-nicey in this response.  I don’t mind debating topics, but generally, I do my homework before I post rather than generalizing or debating via analogy. 

Mitchell Ashley just got my goat with his post since he’s poking the bear with a pretty flimsy stick, all things considered.

Mitchell (and an assembled cast of thousands such as Stiennon, Neihaus, etc…) just can’t get over the fact that their perception and (mis)understanding of what makes an Enterprise/Service Provider UTM solution like the Crossbeam X-Series so phenomenally differentiated and VALUABLE to our customers is NOT about the hardware!

Talk about making me grumpy.  I’m going to sound like Rothman!

It is about the software!  But despite Mitchell’s pleadings like this:

We need some fresh thinking about UTMs or we run the risk of customers thinking the lunatics are on the grass, or something worse.

…he ignores or chooses to remain ignorant about the fact that these "fresh solutions" do exist and how they work and still he continues to eat his own picnic lunch on the lunatic lawn he so dearly hopes to avoid. 🙂

Enterprise/Provider UTM is about the ability to run the best security products on the market in an amazingly scaleable, high-performance, highly-resilient and highly-flexible manner.  It’s about being able to deploy and architecture that allows one to manage risk, improve one’s security posture and deploy on-demand security SOFTWARE solutions where needed, when needed and at a price tag where the risk justifies the cost.

I think it’s fine to be contrarian (God knows I make a career out of it) and I think it’s fine that people continue to generalize about these issues, but I continue to make it my mission to educate those same people that there are solutions that actually solve the very problems they describe in their OTS 1U appliance model hell. 

Of course vendors that base their products on 1U appliances ought to be worried in forecasting the future —  because people are sick of deploying one after another of their darn boxes (even multi-function boxes) to get the value they need…or worse yet, not get the value they need.

The largest enterprises and service providers on the planet are re-evaluating their security architectures and how and why they deploy.  The largest IT/Security project on the planet has evaluated their choices and looked for "fresh solutions" that offer what UTM promises but at levels that support the confidentiality, integrity and availability service levels that they demand.

These folks are not buying Cisco or Juniper and they’re driving vendors who would otherwise have no shot to deploy into their network to run on our boxes.  Out UTM boxes.  They’re buying Crossbeam as an architecture that allows them to deploy a well-planed infrastructure. 

The continued chest pounding about the death of Best-of-Breed and diminishing point of return for the integration of said solutions on "big hardware" are just that — chest pounding.  Why?  Because of the following:

1. Big hardware that scales and does not require forklifts simply provides a stable foundation upon which to deploy and scale your security SOFTWARE.
2. A modular architecture allows the customer to invest over time and simply add blades, add additional SOFTWARE or even upgrade their memory/processors to capitalize on compute requirements
3. Leveraging Best-In-Breed security SOFTWARE solutions allows the customer to choose what the best solution truly is, not settle for one vendor’s version of the truth like Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet or even StillSecure.

I agree that collaboration, interoperatbility and better manageability and useability are needed on ALL platforms, not just UTMs.  Furthermore, one of my biggest missions over the next year is to improve just this on our platforms:

Better appliance hardware’s not the only solution to the customer’s
problem (Sorry Chris and my other hardware friends.)

You’re right, and I never said it was.  You should probably learn about what I did say, however.

They want
solutions that bring needed value by; intelligently identifying and communicating information events,
taking action when specific security actions occur, integrating the
functions on the box for me, and make it manageable and easy. Will I
need a log aggregator software (on a separate box) to analyze the logs
of the different parts of my UTM box? Even worse, what if I have
multiple UTMs? Integrated doesn’t mean co-located businesses with a
common receptionist. Yes, it needs a shiny GUI (well, at least a GUI
any way) but the functions really need to be integrated. And what if
the customer want to expand what the box can do? Make it run other
network software. Our paradigm needs some changing.

Hello!?  Our box runs 25+ applications that our customers asked us to establish a partnership with!  Perhaps "your" paradigm needs changing, but  "my" paradigm  works just fine — in fact it’s the same one you are  promoting!  Have we achieved the level of integration we desire?  No.  We’re working very hard at it, however.

Mitchell, if you’re going to generalize and call for new, "fresh" ideas regarding UTM and basically challenge the facts I’ve put forward, at least spend the 15 minutes as Alan did to learn about my solution before you dismiss it and lump it into the boneyard with the rest of the skeletons, mkay!?

Chris