Lori MacVittie

In the case of technology – as with mythology - the whole is often greater (and more challenging) than the sum of its parts. The chimera is a mythological beast of scary proportions. Not only is it fairly large, but it’s also got three, independent heads – traditionally a lion, a goat, and a snake. Some variations on this theme exist, but the basic principle remains: it’s a three-headed, angry beast that should not be taken lightly should one encounter it in the hallway. Individually, one might have a strategy to meet the challenge of a lion or a goat head on. But when they converge into one very angry and dangerous beast, the strategies and tactics employed to best any one of them will almost certainly not work to address all three of them simultaneously. The world of mobility is rapidly approaching its own technological chimera, one comprised of three individual te... (more)

The API Is the Center of the Application (Integration) Universe

Some have tried to distinguish between “mobile cloud” and “cloud” by claiming the former is the use of the web browser on a mobile device to access services while the latter uses device-native applications. Like all things cloud, the marketing fluff is purposefully obfuscating and sweeping under the rug the technology required to make things work for consumers, whether those consumers be your kids or IT professionals. Infrastructure is not eliminated when organizations take to the cloud nor do the constraints of web-based protocols and methodologies become irrelevant when Bob use... (more)

The Fundamental Problem with Traditional Inbound Protection

The past year brought us many stories focusing on successful attacks on organizations for a wide variety of reasons. Why an organization was targeted was not nearly as important as the result: failure to prevent an outage. While the volume of traffic often seen by these organizations was in itself impressive, it was not the always the volume of traffic that led to the outage, but rather what that traffic was designed to do: consume resources. It’s a story we’ve heard before, particularly with respect to web and application servers. We know that over-consumption of resources impair... (more)

F5 Friday: Goodbye Defense in Depth. Hello Defense in Breadth.

#adcfw #infosec F5 is changing the game on security by unifying it at the application and service delivery layer. Over the past few years we’ve seen firewalls fail repeatedly. We’ve seen business disrupted, security thwarted, and reputations damaged by the failure of the very devices meant to prevent such catastrophes from happening. These failures have been caused by a change in tactics from invaders who seek no longer to find away through or over the walls, but who simply batter it down instead. A combination of traditional attacks – network-layer – and modern attacks – applic... (more)

At the Intersection of Cloud and Control...

The battle of efficiency versus economy continues in the division of the cloud market between public and private environments. Public cloud proponents argue, correctly, that private cloud simply does not offer the same economy of scale as that of public cloud. But that only matters if economy of scale is more important than the efficiency gains realized through any kind of cloud computing implementation. Cloud for most organizations has been recognized as transformational not necessarily in where the data center lives, but rather in how the data center operates. Private cloud is... (more)