Security Strategy, Plan, Budget

In less than nine months in 2007, a botnet-driven junk email network earned $7.5 million for its operators -- just one example of the polished, modern-day spam operation, a panelist said Wednesday at the SC World Congress.

Panelists called for increased cloud security while speaking Monday night at the Jericho Forum's "Breaking Down Barriers to Secure Collaboration," held in conjunction with the SC World Congress.

Bradford Networks is no stranger to these pages. An innovator from last year, Bradford has been reviewed a num­ber of times over the years, always doing well. This year we asked them how well their crystal ball last year worked as 2008 unfolded.

Here is another vendor that we see a lot of in our labs. Passlogix knows who it is and concentrates on doing what it does as well as it can be done. And what they do is credential management.

Start with the recognition that identity management is just too hard to do, cre­ate a solution for that problem and then morph it into a successful service and you have the recipe for a real innovator.

What sets these guys apart from the multifactor herd? In a word, vision. From the start, TriCipher has had the vision of evolving into a full identity management provider. That is a pretty heady ambition for a developer of multifactor authentication tools. So how does this innovator plan to make the trip from providing a piece of the puzzle to offering the whole thing, already assembled, framed and hung on the wall?

This Swedish company will, I predict, set the benchmark here in the United States for how access to applications should be controlled. AppGate has helped shape the direction of network infrastructure security in Europe for some years, and now this innovator is bringing its unique thoughts to the States.

When your price starts at $50,000 and you are unique in your marketplace, you'd better have a good product. For Mu Dynamics, that is just where the story starts. When I first met the Mu folks, they were Mu Security. A new name later, they still are the innovators they were a couple of years ago. My conversation with a Mu visionary was an eye-opener.