Friday, August 13, 2004
August Info Security ad-counts
I got my "Information Security" magazine today, and ran a count of the ads in it:
A bit weirdly formatted, but there you are. It seems that FUD has fallen from first place and convenience has taken its place. It is worth noting that the 'before the table of contents' ads are both security management firms, and the back-cover is a spam widget.
From this it would seem that the Big Money in security these days is in management firms. The message is, "Why do this hideously complex task yourself, when you can buy our expert services?" The widget-makers still have a high FUD quotient, but are coming around to the ease-of-management line. Even though this issue is "wonder appliances", there were very few wonder appliances advertised like that. I'm somewhat surprised that regulatory-compliance isn't a big mover yet, so far only the one ad stressed that.
How does this impact us? Not a whit! We're a University. Information shall be free, remember? Plus, we don't get a lot in the way of budget for restrictive technologies. Organizationally speaking, we're only now coming around to the idea that denying outbound traffic might be a good idea in some cases (individually we've been saying this for years). The concept of an actual honest-to-god firewall at 'the border' is one that causes reflexive quivering on a number of points, so we've been making do with router rules all throughout the infrastructure (which can do way more than I thought they could, having come from a firewalled OldJob).
| FUD | We-are-nifty | Hard-made-easy |
Regulatory | |
| Security Service Management | 2 | 1 | 5 | 1 |
| Widgets | 4 | 2 | 3 | 0 |
| Training | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| in-house ads | 6 | |||
| Total ads | 28 |
From this it would seem that the Big Money in security these days is in management firms. The message is, "Why do this hideously complex task yourself, when you can buy our expert services?" The widget-makers still have a high FUD quotient, but are coming around to the ease-of-management line. Even though this issue is "wonder appliances", there were very few wonder appliances advertised like that. I'm somewhat surprised that regulatory-compliance isn't a big mover yet, so far only the one ad stressed that.
How does this impact us? Not a whit! We're a University. Information shall be free, remember? Plus, we don't get a lot in the way of budget for restrictive technologies. Organizationally speaking, we're only now coming around to the idea that denying outbound traffic might be a good idea in some cases (individually we've been saying this for years). The concept of an actual honest-to-god firewall at 'the border' is one that causes reflexive quivering on a number of points, so we've been making do with router rules all throughout the infrastructure (which can do way more than I thought they could, having come from a firewalled OldJob).
<permalink> posted by riedesg : 3:56 PM
