360is Appoints Steve Barnett to Advisory Board

Steve Barnett has been an associate of the company for several years since 360is founders worked with him during their time at Unipalm PIPEX in Cambridge UK. We are now delighted to announce his official appointment as the first member of our advisory board.

Steve brings with him a wealth of experience and contacts in the IT Security sector, having established CheckPoint's operations in Europe as Managing Director, growing sales from $4.5M to $85M in-region.

Welcome Steve!

360is Opens Scottish Office

We are delighted to announce the opening of our Scotland office, and the appointment of Bill McMillan as regional sales manager for Scottish and Borders clients. Bill has a long history in the enterprise storage industry and will be managing our existing clients and growing the business in this region. Call us to discuss your requirements.

360is Welcomes Datacenter Services Ltd

We are pleased to welcome the clients and staff of Datacenter Services Ltd to the group. DSL is a specialist in Server Virtualization and was established by some of the people behind Citrix XenSource biggest UK reseller. DSL provides products and services to allow clients to take full advantage of virtualization in mission critical environments, and counts some of the UK largest users of Virtualization technology as customers, including BT and Credit Suisse. Robert Gilson, Managing Director of DSL commented:

"Having worked together with 360is on many projects, we are delighted to be able to formally offer a combined set of security and datacentre professional services to our clients".

Updated: Solaris 10 package for scponly SPARC

By popular demand, and after many emails from readers of our previous post, we have now released an scponly package for Solaris 10 on SPARC. The package is available for download here. Thanks go to Keith, Jarrod, Jimmy, Dan, and all the rest of you who reminded us.

Where have all the Products gone?

Today we have a guest blogger! Steve has been a long-standing friend of the company and has been involved in the IT security industry since the early 1990's, where he managed the European Operations of CheckPoint. We caught up at one of Europe's busiest events, the Infosec Show at London Olympia.

Here's what he had to say.

Being the first day of the Infosecurity Show in London my eye was caught by the comments of Security Industry guru, Bruce Schneier, now CEO of BT Counterpane.

Bruce reports hearing an increasingly familiar comment at the RSA conference in San Francisco. "I can't figure out what these security companies do!". I would go further and suggest that, if he could figure out what they did he probably wouldn't want them anyway, because often they are not a solution to a problem he will recognise. Because he is unlikely to be the actual customer. As the recent rash of acquisitions shows, for many IT security vendors their "product" is just a future feature, of another vendors products.

It's like the evolution of the automobile; Bodywork, Lights, Speedo's, Rev counters, Disk brakes, Radios and SatNavs were once all retrofit products now they are standard features.

Here are a few security related examples

• SSL VPN: Unlike MPLS, this was absorbed into the Firewall business, with Firewall vendors selling VPNs and vice versa.
• Hard-disk encryption: A "no brainer" for laptops and Seagate now bundle it (though I still recommend Pointsec).
• TCP/IP for PC's: Not security but I like the example; FTP Software, SUNsoft, Wollongong - all distant memories.
• PKI: Baltimore... need I say more?

In some cases the solutions are so esoteric no one could justify the expense, or so invasive to deploy, the CIO cannot build an ROI anyone really believes.

So, for general business and consumer consumption, IT Security products will further become features; Firewalls in routers, encryption on desktops, PKI & SSL VPN capability built into everything and Antivirus/SPAM increasingly dealt with in the cloud, and so it will continue even applications will become more secure by design.

Saying all this, the next SatNav-like feature will probably still surprise us, maybe not as critical as brakes, but certainly meeting a customer need they didn't realise they had.

IT Security is an enabler, but it is not the application that drives the business. So, I will be at Infosec over the next few days looking for new security "features" that will eventually become part of business solutions. Things that will contribute to my customers bottom line, things like: Virtualisation, Unified Communications, and Smoother Transaction Processing.

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More of Steve's postings are to be found here.