Kevin Nikkhoo

The biggest eye-opener in Gartner's recently-published study on the current agenda regarding the digital landscape for Chief Information Officers is that CIO’s recognize that cloud computing will not only be a significant part of the future, but that their own roles and behavior need to be updated to survive in the modern enterprise. “CIOs will have to develop new IT strategies and plans that go beyond the usual day-to-day maintenance of an enterprise IT infrastructure…. technologies provide a platform to achieve results, but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value.” Most CIOs recognize that the future of enterprise IT lay not with sitting and writing code and patching servers, but rather one of strategic development and as an integrator of business goals: riding the sea change from a person plugging in cables to an analyst; from a compiler ... (more)

The New Standard: Intelligence-Driven Security

In a recent blog post, Art Coviello, the executive chairman at RSA, posed an important question. How do we move from traditional security to intelligence-driven security? In his answer he described that the quickly interdependent exchanges between parties (B2C, B2B, B2P, etc) have grown beyond the traditional means of securing the enterprise: “IT organizations have continued to construct security infrastructures around a disintegrating perimeter of increasingly ineffective controls.” He described a new-model of cyber-security that includes five concepts: A thorough understanding o... (more)

Adaptive Risk: Making Sure You Are Who You Say You Are

Does this sound familiar? Ann, sitting at her desk eating lunch, is surfing the Net. She checks her personal Yahoo email account and sees a message from a purported survey company asking her about her music preferences. She opens the email and takes the survey. Seems harmless enough, but what Ann doesn’t know is that this survey company doesn’t exist and embedded in some of the survey prompts hides an undetected botnet that downloaded onto her desktop. This nasty bugger can record her keystrokes and take screen shots as she navigates through your network. Now some unauthorized en... (more)

When Is a Stack Not a Stack? When It's Unified in the Cloud

While trawling the blogs, feeds and news I came across an analyst’s article about best security practices in which he kept referring to “the stack.” And by this, he meant a multitude of various solutions that address certain security needs and capabilities; everything from email filtering, firewalling, authenticating, credentialing, logging and intrusion detection, etc... And, if you read my blogs often enough, you know I am a big proponent of unified security. However, unified security is not a stack. It is easy to be confused as both look to utilize best of breed tools to prev... (more)

Sailing the Seven Cs of Security Monitoring

What is it your mom used to say? “A watched pot never boils.” This might be true, but a watched pot also never spills; it never allows your younger sister to stick her hand in the hot water; prevents Uncle Jack from tasting before dinner is ready; and if something unforeseen happens, there is time to mitigate the problems. One of the established best practices in InfoSec is monitoring. People, products and companies get paid a great deal of money and expend a great deal of resources to watch pots. Monitoring simply is the central component to any security initiative. If you don’... (more)