Spot check this morning with 3 F500 CISOs:

1. Major budget meltdown
2. Unaffected so far, still looking to increase spending next year
3. Best case scenario, we run at the same level as this year

Call Me?

(Reality Blogging by Carl Dufton of Century 21 Bay Properties.  Please buy real estate from this gentleman to reward him for his bravery on the small business front lines against phreaking)

Call me, my life
Call me, call me, any, anytime
Call me, for a ride
Call me, call me for some overtime
Take me out, and show me off
Put me on the scene…    Deborah Harry – Blondie 1980

Tech-Risk – You all mitigate it on many levels – most of them on a playing field that for most of the businesses that you protect, work for, or consult with, simply don’t have the staffing, expertise, or time to expend to keep on the cutting edge to safeguard their assets.  That’s what YOU are all about.

But, allow me to take you down to what may be the lowest level in the tech protection pecking order pyramid.  Who you ask? SOHO operators, that’s who.  Small business owners and managers.  You know, the folks that do their own honest best to keep their anti-virus updated and their operating system software updated, and smugly know about Nigerian 411 scams and the everyday stuff.  More interested in preventing pop-ups, stopping spam emails, and blocking malicious websites than to worry about a gaping hole in their SOHO tech risk mitigation program.  Ho hum… Who’d be interested in hacking them?  Who indeed.

Let me tell you about a friend of mine.  (Smart, tech savvy, handsome, small business owner, and staff of 35 in two locations, real estate brokerage services)  All right… you guessed it…. me. (more…)

Oracle announced that they are offering their 11g database on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud).  This is not a sales gimmick as Oracle is allowing customers to use their existing product licenses at par with Amazon.  Another sign that the cloud is becoming inevitable and CISOs should be ready.

Jim Reavis speaks NAC.  Register here.

Give a hand to the historic site of Allied codebreaking during World War II and a cornerstone of modern cryptography and computing.  PGP and IBM are leading a drive to preserve Bletchley Park, you can read about it here.  Here is the Wikipedia listing for Bletchley Park.