Blog

By Allen Allison Regardless of your industry, customer base, or product, it is highly likely that you face regulatory compliance requirements. If you handle Protected Health Information (PHI), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – along with the HITECH enhancement ...

Quocirca saw an estimate recently that IT security managers can spend as much as 30% of their time preparing for and delivering audits. This is mundane and uninteresting work and if it can be automated – all the better. However, recent Quocirca research, sponsored by sys-admin tools vendor Osi ...

This is a good read if you missed it – the most recent report by the ever-interesting Verizon PCI and Risk Intelligence Teams on the state of PCI Compliance. It's the usual mix of "no surprise there" moments followed by a few "Huh, really?  REALLY?" sections. Ov ...

By Merritt Maximi A major benefit associated with deploying identity management and/or identity governance into an organization is that these solutions provide the ability to detect and remove orphan accounts. Orphan accounts refer to active accounts belonging to a user who is no longer involved w ...

By Allen Allison With the rapid adoption of cloud computing technologies, IT organizations have found a way to deliver applications and services more quickly and efficiently to their customers, incorporating the nearly ubiquitous utility-like platforms of managed cloud services companies. The use ...

Often when I chat with people within the industry, the one thing I expect is a consistent message akin to a broken record. De-perimiterization, consumerization, defense in depth – the list of things I hear brought up in nearly every conversation is as fine tuned as a political candidate&rsqu ...

By Allen Allison Managed cloud services are quickly being adopted by large enterprises. Organizations are increasingly embracing cloud technologies for core services like financial systems, IT infrastructure, online merchant sites, and messaging solutions. This adoption rate is creating an ever-i ...

By Eric Baize In Survey after survey, security and more specifically the lack of control and visibility around what is happening to your information on cloud provider premises, is listed as the number one barrier to cloud adoption. So far, there have been two approaches to solving the problem: ...

  The importance of ongoing/continuous PCI DSS compliance processes as an effective means to curb security breaches at a merchant’s site is being touted by many experts in the PCI field lately. Verizon's recommendations also mention this importance in it’s recently released report ...

A good article in InfoSecurity on May 5th on the HITECH act got me thinking (as good articles should) about health records, security, and well, all things HIPAA-ish. I certainly agree with much of what was said, and I think it’s clear that the pressure is ramping up rapidly to not only comply ...

As you all know, I have two main pet themes: Risk Management and Compliance Management as I see very often that there is room for improvement when it comes to such processes within our customers. Internally, we often think about how we can make it easier for our customers to manage compliance in the ...

Beginning of this year, I tried to understand, whether we can show a collaboration between Piracy (stolen software) and Malware Infections. I played a little bit with the data I had available and came to the conclusion, that there most probably is: Is there a Correlation between Stolen Software (Pir ...

In my first post here, I opened the field for a series on “Why it pays to be secure”. As I told you there, Henk van Roest, our Security Support Program Manager in EMEA kicked this off for internal training. Let’s return to the theme of deploying security updates once more, we need ...

You might all know that feeling: You need money to finance security activities and you are asked why this money shall be invested. And then we start to argue that if we do not do it – bad things happen. These are questions that myself and our support get often. That was the reason why we start ...