I recently saw an executive carrying five mobile devices. There was an iPhone in one pocket, a BlackBerry in another, an Andriod in his jacket, a Droid Pro stuffed somewhere else, and an iPad in the back of his pants. It made me wonder when we’ll gain the ability to have one device (of our choice) that can do it all rather than be forced to roll like the human equivalent of a clown car.

A wave of consumer devices has flooded the enterprise and caused some tsunami-type problems for IT and for employees. Companies need to secure this constant parade of devices, and employees want unencumbered access to business information, anytime, all the time, from any device they want.

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Sorry, I couldn’t resist the New York Post headline.

We’re at a very exciting time in our industry. There is a shift underway to mobile devices and cloud computing, both of which have exciting ramifications for unleashing a new wave of productivity in the enterprise. But don’t think that scammers aren’t benefiting off this wave as well. They are also enjoying an increase in productivity.

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Tags: cloud_computing, mobile, security, social causes, spam

It is no secret that technology allows us to be more productive.  Living here in California, I can conduct a meeting with colleagues in India or Egypt while sitting in my living room.   I can answer email while sitting in the car waiting for my son’s soccer practice to finish.  I can leave work early to go grocery shopping, knowing that I can make up for it at home in the evening.

Juggling work and family may not be quite as convenient for many working women in Africa, Southeast Asia, or Latin America, where reliable power supply, affordable bandwidth, and cultural barriers may complicate their efforts.  Still, a growing body of evidence points to a symbiotic relationship between communications technology and the empowerment of women in emerging markets.  What’s more, it makes business sense to tap into and facilitate this virtuous relationship.  It’s a classic win-win situation, if it is done right.

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Tags: Emerging Markets, security, TelePresence

Recently, our country was up in arms over the new airport security requirements imposed by the Transportation and Security Agency. Travelers complained that new full-body scanners and pat-downs at airport security checkpoints were inconvenient and invasive, and major concern ensued that objectors to the new regulations would cause significant delays over the Thanksgiving holiday — the busiest travel time of the year. Grassroots groups were encouraging travelers to either refrain from flying or opt out of full-body scans and choose the more time-consuming pat-downs as a protest. Despite all the hoopla, the Thanksgiving travel rush was not impacted by the new laws. In fact, a recent CBS poll revealed that 4 out of 5 people support the new security measures.

We as individuals like to whine about laws and regulations that keep us safe, and the same can be said for organizations. As Cisco security team members, we have heard our share of customers grumble about regulatory compliance requirements such as HIPAA, SOX, and most recently the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS). These regulations can be, at times, cumbersome to deal with. Yet, when asked in a recent Cisco-commissioned survey about their sentiments on PCI compliance, organizations were largely positive and on board with PCI.

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Tags: pci, pci-dss, security

This is the Forth part in the series “Missives from the Trenches.” (Here are the (first), (second), and(third) parts of the series.) In today’s blog post we will be discussing Cisco IOS Netflow. Netflow has an interesting position as being both the most useful and least used tool. When meeting with other companies I often ask them “do you use Netflow?” By asking this question I am actually asking several different questions--Do you care about the security of your site? Or do you have any hopes in managing/responding to events at your site? Answers to these questions unfortunately tend to be as follows: What is Netflow? The network guys use it but we don’t. I think we capture it somewhere but not really sure where -- and so on. I then mention that Netflow is free, they don’t have to buy anything to start using it, and it’s used for every large case we do. At that point they start looking angrily at the sales engineer asking why this is the first they are hearing about it. So what is Netflow and why does Cisco CSIRT say its critical to daily event management? Read on to find out!

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Tags: APT, CSIRT, security, TRAC