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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 19th December '11
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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 2nd December '11
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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 17th November '11
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”...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 2nd November '11
Don't forget the network
A recent new story in New Scientist: “Light is not fast enough for high-speed stock trading”, reminds us how important the speed of network communications has become for some organisations.
….“cable company Hibernia Atlantic...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 28th October '11
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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 26th October '11
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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 21st October '11
Computer says no - why?
Despite fears of being replaced by robots or computers, the terms that twenty-five years ago described the use of IT in different professional sectors were less about substitution and more about support. Programmers used computer aided software...
Rob Bamforth, Quocirca | 21st September '11
Don't let your brand name be flushed away
A snippet in Private Eye earlier this year (8 July, 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 a political...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 5th September '11
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...
Bob Tarzey, Quocirca | 3rd August '11