The rise of enterprise-class cybersecurity vendors

When I’m asked to explain what’s happening with enterprise cybersecurity technology, I often use an analogy from the business software market in the 1990s. Back then, application vendors tended to specialize in one area—PeopleSoft owned HR, Baan offered manufacturing apps, JD Edwards played in finance, etc. Around 1995, companies began replacing these departmental applications with enterprise-class ERP solutions from Oracle and SAP. The objective? Centralize all business data into a common repository that could anchor the business and be updated and used for various departmental functions and business processes in real time. + Also on Network World: Cybersecurity companies to watch + Yes, the ERP journey was a bit painful, but the transition resulted in a steady increase in business productivity, enhanced efficiency and better decision making.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud security startup RedLock automates public-cloud protection

Cloud security startup RedLock comes out of stealth mode today with a service that helps defend business resources that reside in pubic clouds, gives customers visibility into how these resources are being used and stores records of that activity for auditing and forensics.+More on Network World: FBI/IC3: Vile $5B business e-mail scam continues to breed+ RedLock Because virtual machines, application instances and workloads change rapidly it’s hard to get a good picture of what’s going on within cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, says RedLock’s CEO Varun Badwhar. “It’s hard to manually monitor and control,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Signal Sciences wants to protect ALL the web

The security space is one area where there are a massive number of vendors all offering to solve particular discrete problems. That is all well and good if you have a singular, discrete problem to solve, but what happens if you’re looking for a solution that covers the totality of your needs?Signal Science wants to be the answer to that question, the company offers a web protection product that covers cloud, physical and containerized infrastructure and provides security prioritization based on where applications are targeted. Signal Sciences claims Under Armour, Etsy, Yelp and Shutterstock as customers.+ Also on Network World: What to ask when selecting application security solutions + The company is making a dual announcement today. The first about its platform overall; the second is some fundraising news. Since fundraising is often seen as a validation of the product story, I’ll cover off the money side of things first. Signal Sciences has raised a $15 million Series B funding round led by Charles River Ventures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Signal Sciences wants to protect ALL the web

The security space is one area where there are a massive number of vendors all offering to solve particular discrete problems. That is all well and good if you have a singular, discrete problem to solve, but what happens if you’re looking for a solution that covers the totality of your needs?Signal Science wants to be the answer to that question, the company offers a web protection product that covers cloud, physical and containerized infrastructure and provides security prioritization based on where applications are targeted. Signal Sciences claims Under Armour, Etsy, Yelp and Shutterstock as customers.+ Also on Network World: What to ask when selecting application security solutions + The company is making a dual announcement today. The first about its platform overall; the second is some fundraising news. Since fundraising is often seen as a validation of the product story, I’ll cover off the money side of things first. Signal Sciences has raised a $15 million Series B funding round led by Charles River Ventures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud security startup RedLock automates public-cloud protection

Cloud security startup RedLock comes out of stealth mode today with a service that helps defend business resources that reside in pubic clouds, gives customers visibility into how these resources are being used and stores records of that activity for auditing and forensics.+More on Network World: FBI/IC3: Vile $5B business e-mail scam continues to breed+ RedLock Because virtual machines, application instances and workloads change rapidly it’s hard to get a good picture of what’s going on within cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, says RedLock’s CEO Varun Badwhar. “It’s hard to manually monitor and control,” he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Staples hires its very first CISO

Staples has hired its first chief information security officer (CISO), a key new member of the office supply giant's team that combines traditional IT and digital transformation. Staples New Staples CISO  Brett Wahlin CISO Brett Wahlin, who will report to the company's CTO, will be responsible for enterprise-wide information, product and data security during a time in which Staples looks to expand its delivery business.  His responsibilities extend into areas such as connected devices (think Amazon Echo/Google Home digital assistant competition in the office), fraud and loss prevention. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Staples hires its very first CISO

Staples has hired its first chief information security officer (CISO), a key new member of the office supply giant's team that combines traditional IT and digital transformation. Staples New Staples CISO  Brett Wahlin CISO Brett Wahlin, who will report to the company's CTO, will be responsible for enterprise-wide information, product and data security during a time in which Staples looks to expand its delivery business.  His responsibilities extend into areas such as connected devices (think Amazon Echo/Google Home digital assistant competition in the office), fraud and loss prevention. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux Foundation to develop tool for building blockchain business networks

The Linux Foundation announced a new software project under its Hyperledger open consortium aimed at creating a collaboration tool for building blockchain business networks -- or smart contracts -- and their deployment across a distributed ledger.The new project, called Hyperleder Composer, is a modeling language based on JavaScript and with REST API support, that allows non-developers and developers to model their business network. The language also supports modeling of relationships and data validation rules.For example, all blockchain business networks share certain elements, such as assets, participants, identities, transactions, and registries. With existing blockchain or distributed ledger technologies, it can be difficult for organizations to take a blockchain business use case and map the concepts into running code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

McNealy sees Sun’s past in IoT’s future

When Sun Microsystems said, "The network is the computer," it might have been talking about the Internet of Things, which was little more than an idea at the time. Today, more machines than ever are talking to other machines, and computing is being distributed across far-flung networks.Onetime Sun CEO Scott McNealy sees some of the legendary company's vision coming to fruition in an IoT "data bus" from a small Silicon Valley outfit called Real-Time Innovations. On Tuesday, McNealy became the first member of RTI's Advisory Board.RTI's data bus is middleware for delivering the right information at the right time to all the people and systems that need it. The software runs on meshed computing nodes that can be a small as a microcontroller, and it uses several kinds of network connections to make sure the data gets through.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

McNealy sees Sun’s past in IoT’s future

When Sun Microsystems said, "The network is the computer," it might have been talking about the Internet of Things, which was little more than an idea at the time. Today, more machines than ever are talking to other machines, and computing is being distributed across far-flung networks.Onetime Sun CEO Scott McNealy sees some of the legendary company's vision coming to fruition in an IoT "data bus" from a small Silicon Valley outfit called Real-Time Innovations. On Tuesday, McNealy became the first member of RTI's Advisory Board.RTI's data bus is middleware for delivering the right information at the right time to all the people and systems that need it. The software runs on meshed computing nodes that can be a small as a microcontroller, and it uses several kinds of network connections to make sure the data gets through.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Tricentis and Panaya automate SAP testing

One criticism that I have never heard leveled at enterprise software vendor SAP is that it over simplifies things. Quite the opposite. In fact, SAP is well known for being a seriously complicated set of applications that offers huge amounts of flexibility, but huge amounts of complexity to go with it. Perhaps that is why a Google search on “SAP implementations gone wrong” brings up a steady stream of disaster stories.So, at first blush the partnership between Tricentis and Panaya makes sense. Panaya is a division of outsourcing company Infosys. It helps organizations using SAP and Oracle solutions to be more agile (and, yes, for the naysayers, “agile” is a relative term). It also helps with testing and collaboration across the entire software release process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SD-WAN: Controller and Router Placement

Oracle hits back at modular Java critics

With voting on a module system for Java set to close within the Java community, a high-ranking official at Oracle is again defending the plan amid criticism from Red Hat.Modularity is the main feature in Java 9, which is due to arrive July 27—if the disagreement over modularization does not hold up the release. Oracle's Mark Reinhold, chief architect in the company's Java platform group, sent out an email on an openjdk mailing list Monday, arguing the issues being brought up have already been covered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IT worker who trained H-1B-holding replacement aims for Congress

Craig Diangelo was an IT worker at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut until he completed training his H-1B-visa-holding replacement. He was one of about 200 who lost their jobs in 2014 after two India-based IT offshore outsourcing firms took over their work at what is now called Eversource.Diangelo, at first, was quiet, bound by severance agreements signed with the company. Then he started speaking out. Craig Diangelo Craig DiangeloTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to check for the Intel Active Management exploit that lets hackers take over your PC

If you think you're immune from a scary exploit found in Intel's Active Management Technology just because you're a consumer, think again.The exploit, disclosed on May 1, lets bad actors bypass authentication in Intel's remote management hardware to take over your PC. This hardware, built into enterprise-class PCs, lets IT administrators remotely manage fleets of computers—install patches and software, and even update the BIOS as though they were sitting in front of it. It is, in essence, a God-mode.Here's the fine print: Many early news reports said "consumer PCs are unaffected." But what Intel actually said was, "consumer PCs with consumer firmware" are unaffected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to check for the Intel Active Management exploit that lets hackers take over your PC

If you think you're immune from a scary exploit found in Intel's Active Management Technology just because you're a consumer, think again.The exploit, disclosed on May 1, lets bad actors bypass authentication in Intel's remote management hardware to take over your PC. This hardware, built into enterprise-class PCs, lets IT administrators remotely manage fleets of computers—install patches and software, and even update the BIOS as though they were sitting in front of it. It is, in essence, a God-mode.Here's the fine print: Many early news reports said "consumer PCs are unaffected." But what Intel actually said was, "consumer PCs with consumer firmware" are unaffected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 things you need to know about IoT security

Security, trust and data integrityImage by ThinkstockThe emergence of IoT is altering our personal technology security paradigm and is a game-changer in customer/business interaction, in part due to the wide scope of available data and sheer number of devices collecting this data. McKinsey & Company estimates the IoT ecosystem will generate $6 trillion in value by 2025. Successful IoT offerings rely on the perception of benefit they can deliver to businesses and consumers while creating a proportionate foundation of security, trust, and data integrity. There are important ways that IoT technology can reduce data security risk while improving customer experience in a connected world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 things you need to know about IoT security

Security, trust and data integrityImage by ThinkstockThe emergence of IoT is altering our personal technology security paradigm and is a game-changer in customer/business interaction, in part due to the wide scope of available data and sheer number of devices collecting this data. McKinsey & Company estimates the IoT ecosystem will generate $6 trillion in value by 2025. Successful IoT offerings rely on the perception of benefit they can deliver to businesses and consumers while creating a proportionate foundation of security, trust, and data integrity. There are important ways that IoT technology can reduce data security risk while improving customer experience in a connected world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

6 things you need to know about IoT security

Security, trust and data integrityImage by ThinkstockThe emergence of IoT is altering our personal technology security paradigm and is a game-changer in customer/business interaction, in part due to the wide scope of available data and sheer number of devices collecting this data. McKinsey & Company estimates the IoT ecosystem will generate $6 trillion in value by 2025. Successful IoT offerings rely on the perception of benefit they can deliver to businesses and consumers while creating a proportionate foundation of security, trust, and data integrity. There are important ways that IoT technology can reduce data security risk while improving customer experience in a connected world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

15 of the highest paying jobs in IT

Technology offers some of the highest paying and diverse jobs of any industry. While traditional tech roles like software engineer and product manager are still in high demand as CIOs struggle to find skilled IT pros, roles in sales, marketing and business development all offer healthy salaries and an alternate path into the industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)