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Bob Tarzey

Job title:
Analyst and Director, Quocirca Ltd

Biography:
Bob joined Quocirca in 2002, his main area of coverage is route to market for ITC vendors, but he also has a specific focus on IT security, network computing, systems management and managed services. Bob writes regular analytical columns and blogs for Computing, Computer Weekly, silicon.com, Computer Reseller News (CRN), Infosecurity Magazine and IT Director. He has has written for The Times, Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph and provides general comment for the European IT and business press. Bob has extensive knowledge of the IT industry. Prior to joining Quocirca in he spent 16 years working for US technology vendors including DEC (now HP), Sybase (now SAP), Gupta, Merant (now Serena), eGain and webMethods (now Software AG). Bob has a BSc in Geology from Manchester University and PhD in Geochemistry from Leicester University.

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Organisations Struggle to Safely and Securely Delegate Sys-admin Tasks
Many system administrator tasks are a repetitive drudge. Senior IT managers do not want to be doing such tasks on a day-to-day basis and would prefer to delegate these to junior staff or contractors from 3rd parties. However, they need to be confident that such tasks can be safely delegated by limit ...
Posted 18 May 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: sys-admin, outsourcing
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Quocirca’s Report from Infosecurity Europe 2012
The end of April was a busy time for IT security analysts. April 24th to 26th was Infosecurity Europe (InfoSec) at Earl’s Court, the biggest such trade show in Europe and the following week was the Eskenzi PR annual IT Security Analysts Conference and CISO Forum (a gathering of chief informati ...
Posted 08 May 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: Infosecurity Europe
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The Consequences of Failing to Backup Network and Security Devices
Most IT users will have suffered the frustration of losing work because their access device (PC, tablet, smartphone etc.) fails and has not been backed up, or indeed they may have deleted a file accidentally. This is inconvenient for the individual and those associated with the project they are work ...
Posted 16 April 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: backup, network security, disaster recovery
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Windows Desktop Admin Rights – An Open Door for Malware?
Quocirca has written extensively about privileged user management over the years, including two research reports Conquering the sys-admin challenge in 2011 and Privileged user management – it’s time to take control in 2009. One of the dangers highlighted in both reports is that if privil ...
Posted 03 April 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: Windows, privilege, admin rights
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Reducing the Number of Sys-admin Errors
In recent Quocirca research, businesses report that on average their system administrators (sys-admins) make errors carrying out about 6% of tasks. This might not sound like much, but actually it adds up to quite a big number. If system administrators carry out and average of 10 tasks per day, or 5 ...
Posted 14 March 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: sys-admin, privileged users
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Organisations Failing to Close-off the Risks of Legacy Privileged Accounts
If you are trying to compromise an organisation’s IT systems in some way, then you need to have access. Getting a given user’s log in details is a starting point but might not get you that far, unless they are a user with privilege. Privileged users have much wider ranging access than &l ...
Posted 07 March 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: access management
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Facing Up to the Application Security Challenge
A new Quocirca report underlines the scale of the application security challenge faced by businesses. The average enterprise tracks around 500 mission critical applications, in financial services organisations it is closer to 800. The security challenge arises because more and more of these applicat ...
Posted 02 March 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: application security, pen testing, PCI
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Xerox and McAfee: A joint force to integrate security into the print world
This blog post was written by Quocirca's print speciailst, Louella Ferandes Despite a continued reliance on printing, many businesses overlook print security in their overall approach to data protection. This may be set to change with the recent announcement that Xerox will be incorporating McAfee ...
Posted 17 February 2012 by Bob Tarzey
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Safe Authentication for Remote Sys-Admin Tasks
Not all systems administration (sys-admin) is done by people. Some applications need administrator access to communicate and make changes. Furthermore, remote management tasks are often carried out using pre-set procedures in sys-admin tools, for example the backup of branch office devices. For thi ...
Posted 15 February 2012 by Bob Tarzey
tags: authentication, identity
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Secure Disposal of Old IT Equipment
Network and security devices age just like any other IT equipment. As the IT industry moves toward 100 gigabit/second Ethernet and 100 megabit/second broadband connections, many existing devices will no longer cope with traffic volumes. The need to replace routers, firewalls, load-balancers, content ...
Posted 14 December 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: WEEE, recycling, data loss, disk shredding
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A critical software problem for banks
New Quocirca research (sponsored by on-demand software code security specialist, Veracode) underlines a problem faced by financial services organisations when it comes to security and compliance; they track getting on for twice as many critical software applications as other organisations.   ...
Posted 01 December 2011 by Bob Tarzey
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Auditors want to know about individuals, not groups
 It is pretty obvious that to audit the use of IT resources and applications you need to know who is doing what. This is especially true when it comes to system administrators (sys-admins) who are operating with increased levels of privilege.   Certain regulations and standards make stro ...
Posted 16 November 2011 by Bob Tarzey
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IT security vendors can’t all be right, but they can all be wrong
From recent briefings with a number of IT security vendors it would seem that most can now identify any new threat immediately and that at the same time none of them can. This contradiction is down to the “we can, they can’t” mantra that any vendor of any product is bound to use ag ...
Posted 01 November 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: IT security vendors
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The 1985 iPhone In a Truck
 People of a certain age often enjoy recalling for younger folk the size of the early mobile phones that were lugged around in the mid-1980s, whilst marvelling at the latest smartphones. These brick-sized devices could not even send text (SMS) messages (the first of which was sent in 1992); the ...
Posted 28 October 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: security, consumerization, billing contracts
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Consumers Say No (to data leaks)
A recent Quocirca blog post pointed out there were good business reasons for disclosing data breaches as well as an increasing number of regulatory ones. For those organisations not convinced by these arguments and still intent on attempting to brush leaks under the carpet, there is new evidence tha ...
Posted 25 October 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: data loss, data breach, SIEM
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Don’t Forget the Network
A recent news story in New Scientist reminds us how important the speed of network communications has become for some organisations: ….cable company Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 million to build a new transatlantic cable to shave 6 milliseconds from the present 65-millisecond transit ...
Posted 21 October 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: network security
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Avoiding (awful) bad practice at audit time
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 ...
Posted 18 October 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: audit, compliance
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Responsible Data Leak Disclosure
There has been plenty written, not least by Quocirca, on the danger of data loss and how to prevent it. Less has been said about how to clear up afterwards; when the measures taken to protect a business from such losses have failed or were not present in the first place. In particular the responsibi ...
Posted 16 September 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: DPA, ICO, data leak, data breach, data loss, disclosure
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Don’t let your brand name be flushed away
 A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (July 8th, 2011) showed how touchy companies can get about the use of their brand names. Following the unfortunate death of a festival goer in a toilet at Glastonbury (who also happened to be political activist and friend of the UK’s Prime Minis ...
Posted 01 September 2011 by Bob Tarzey
tags: brand-jacking brand-protection phishing markmonitor
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Do the goings-on in student dorms spell the end for Microsoft?
This week Quocirca had a briefing with a security vendor which provided an insight into a fundamental change going on in the use of IT and one of the major drivers for that change. The vendor was Bradford Networks, (named not for the city in Yorkshire UK, but small town in New Hampshire USA). Bradf ...
Posted 28 July 2011 by Bob Tarzey
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