Tag Archive for: Forbes

The Biggest GDPR Mistake U.S. Companies Are Making

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Forbes | June 12, 2018

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) zero-hour has finally arrived — enforcement started May 25, 2018. Like students cramming for a midterm, I witnessed a flurry of activity from U.S. businesses since the deadline forced people to pay attention, knuckle down and study.

When students cram for a test, they take any shortcuts they can, and that can make for predictable errors, especially any time there is a mentally comfortable answer that happens to be wrong. Psychologists even have a term for this — they call it “availability bias.” In a nutshell, this is our built-in tendency to assume something is right when it’s easy to recall or that it’s wrong just because it’s harder to remember.

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Using Pizza To Understand The Cloud

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Forbes | April 4, 2018

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

It’s a tech evangelist’s worst nightmare. I was forced to explain something complex to a non-technical audience who would rather be doing almost anything else. I found myself in front of a sales force while they were in a vacation mood — possibly involving alcohol. We reward our sales overachievers with a vacation. It’s mostly focused on celebrating their success, but with some light company business thrown in. I was the speaker for a late afternoon session, on the topic of the cloud — and the next item on the agenda was the bar.

My assigned topic was cloud networks — a topic familiar to all, but still fuzzy, just like real clouds. It’s been several years since the famed survey that showed people thought bad weather was a problem for cloud computing.

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Who Says Software-Defined Security Is What We Want?

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Forbes | Dec 21, 2017

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

Gartner’s Hype Cycle is always a fun read. For the 2017 version, I’d like to draw your attention to the dot for Software-Defined Security — you can find it sliding down the precipitous slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the Trough of Disillusionment.

It’s easy to trace the rise and fall. Back in 2014, there was no Software-Defined-Security marker, but Gartner’s annual chart of hype, hope and hallucination had an entry for Software-Defined Anything (way over on the far left), where dreams turn into … well, more dreams (at least for a while). The intervening years saw Software-Defined Security charge up that first hill of expectations, crest over and eventually slide down.

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Perfect Cybersecurity Makes No Business Sense

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Forbes | September 21, 2017

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

We’re going through a shift in thinking in cybersecurity. In the old days, we thought one solid line of defense was enough — keep the bad guys out and life would be good. Then we found out that bad guys are wily and would find different ways in. The result was security sprawl: so many technologies, so many ways to defend, but no way to do it all, no way to hire enough experts in all these different techniques.

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Business Agility And Security Automation (Or, How The Government Sometimes Gets It Right)

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Forbes | July 11, 2017

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

A healthy, growing business is a risky business. Why? Modern businesses must innovate, change and grow continuously to stay ahead of the competition. Normally, we look at business agility as a good thing — a differentiator; a challenge to be embraced; a way to shake the invisible hand that drives our world. But from a security viewpoint, all this change is a problem, especially for cybersecurity.

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Don’t Let Complex Networks Ground Your Operations

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Forbes | April 25, 2017

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

The Wall Street Journal recently wrote (paywall) about the fragile nature of airline IT infrastructure. They highlighted the way that a single point of failure, such as a failed router, can ripple out to impact global operations. This can happen to any of us when we can’t track which objectives depend on particular technology pieces in our complex environments.

While the WSJ article pinpointed the problem in one specific industry and characterized it as an issue with “aging” technology, the problem is both more widespread and subtle than that. Working at RedSeal, I get to see inside the networks of many different types of organizations — civilian, military, global, tiny. One thing they all share: complexity.

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Negative Unemployment: That Giant Sucking Sound In Security

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FORBES | March 21, 2017

By Dr. Mike Lloyd, RedSeal CTO

Businesses everywhere are facing the fact: the security talent pool is dry. I spoke to a manager recently who had hired a security analyst after eight months of searching. Each month he had reduced the requirements and increased the salary. Needless to say, in the end, he was getting less than he wanted for a lot more money. If you are a security professional, this seems great – we have one of the few jobs that are not about to be replaced with automation, and there’s no end in sight to the skills shortage.

But if we take a wider view, this is a big economic problem. Security work is either not getting done, or is being done by people who lack the background or aptitude.

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