Behind the Scenes

March 19, 2007

So, last week, I had the chance to drop in on Mitchell over at StillSecure and check out their soon to be released product (the one that Martin is evangelizing.

And I was really impressed.

Though I haven’t talked about it, I’m not a fan of many of the convergence trends in security – as I walked around RSA this year, I was really quite annoyed by everyone claiming that their “Unified” appliance had everything under the sun in it. “Our appliance not only does anti-virus, IDS, vulnerability scanning, and product QA, but it also cooks dinner, finds your lost socks, and lets you in on the Caramilk secret“.

I think that my annoyance comes down to one obvious point: different functions need to live in different places in the network. This should be obvious to most system administrators – but it doesn’t seem obvious to most of the UTM vendors.

One of the coolest things about the new product is that they really get that factor – even though it’s unifying and convergence-based, it really does focus on the idea that all functionality shouldn’t live in a single place (even though it’s nice to manage it from a single place).

I can’t wait until it comes out. Until then, I’ll be downloading the alpha version. If you want to, you should drop Mitchell an email. It’s definitely worth checking out…

Posted by mmurray | Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

2 Responses to “Behind the Scenes”

  1. Mitchell Ashley on March 20th, 2007 1:59 am

    Mike, It was awesome to see you. Thanks for stopping by.

    Thanks for your input about the convergence product. You had some great ideas.

    Hope to see you again soon. Until then, keep up the good fight for better security.

    - Mitchell

  2. Martin McKeay on March 20th, 2007 8:50 am

    David,

    I’m glad to hear you like Cobia. Mitchell and the team have a great idea and are turning it into a great project. I’m very glad I was able to become part of the whole thing. We’re still in alpha but we’re planning on going to beta early next month.

    I’m available to answer questions, martin +at+ mckeay.net, or you can view the Cobia forums at http://cobia.stillsecure.com. We’re always looking for more testers to give us feedback.

    Looking forward to meeting you face to face in the near future,

    Martin