Rational Survivability

Here are some interesting nuggets that I find compelling:

Trend Micro is buying Third Brigade – One of my favorite Canadian companies is getting hitched. Third Brigade has always been measured and understated in their approach to Virtualiation Security and their entry into Cloud and their solutions tend to deliver good value.  Their “acquisition” of OSSEC was also smart given the nature of guest-oriented controls for Cloud environments.  This is a good move for Trend as it gets them a solution suite they didn’t have previously.

Panda gets cute and cuddly with AV in the Cloud -Take a thin-client, add “Cloud” based scanning and you get a revised model for AV.  I like this idea for a couple of reasons, the most interesting of which relates to the notion of what the aggregated telemetry from all the client interactions will mean to more real-time threat mitigation.  I wrote about this sort of thing a while ago with one of my favorites being a post titled “Thinning the Herd and Chlorinating the Malware Gene Pool”  I’ll be very interested to see how functionally the service compares with traditional AV in terms of efficacy and what sort of performance one might expect.

…and so does McAfee – This appears to be simply a SaaS offering that replaces typical on-premise gateway solutions unlike Panda’s which includes a thin-client endpoint client.  Expect everyone and their mother (and their VC’s mother) to provide this in the short term.

IBM re-enters the networking market via Brocade deal – IBM is extending its existing OEM arrangement with Brocade to include the Ethernet switching and routing products from the Foundry acquisition.   Huh.  I thought they’d already done that with Juniper?  Oh, they’re going to do that, too.  Response to Cisco ya think?  IBM is good at hedging bets.

Forrester Backs Private Clouds – Will Others Follow Suit? – This is both gratifying and personally annoying. Firstly, Forrester is NOT the only analyst company backing Private Clouds.  Gartner is and has (although their definition seems to have morphed) well before Forrester and some of us have been proponents of Private Clouds before they became pop culture. Ugh.

Google Fires Back at VMware about Virtualization for Cloud Computing – Well, of course they do.  Google doesn’t utilize virtualization — they deploy millions of servers instead. It’s a “diabolically-opposed” approach.  Welcome to religious debates 101, please take a seat…or stand.

DMTF announces the Open Cloud Standards Incubator – I don’t know what to think about this.  It sounds like a good idea and has some solid backers.  I noticed that the charter is focused on IaaS/PaaS but not SaaS.  Telling.

Randy Bias says the Open Cloud Is Coming – I reviewed Randy’s original draft and he’s done a good job refining his points although I don’t agree with all of them.  His last statement is a good summary “Ignore the naysayers.  Customers want choice and they will have it.  Choice is driven by open standards, cheap resources, and easy ’self-service’ access.”  Yep, customers want choice, but choice isn’t driven by “open standards.” It’s driven by “open-enough standards” that customers feel meet their needs.

More later.

/Hoff