One of my many roles as a founder and CTO is to meet with customers and talk about their network security issues. These visits are not only informative, they can be humorous as well. For example, a recent visit to a large, fortune 500 company, they told me that one of our firewall competitors explained [...]

Recently, Greg Young of Gartner blogged about Enterprise UTM’s, comparing them to Unicorns and Pixies. I could not have agreed more with everything that Greg has wrote in his blog and would like to focus on his last bullet point. Greg discusses the “Best of breed requirements” that keep enterprises from buying UTM’s.

Check out Richard Stiennon’s blog entry on his Threat Chaos blog. I think very highly of Richard – he has never been afraid, even as a Gartner analyst, to say what he thinks even if some of Gartner’s customers did not like it.
But this time, Richard, I have to disagree with you. Putting a [...]

A couple of weeks ago, McAfee acquired Secure Computing for $465M. For those who missed the irony in it, McAfee had previously sold a big portion of its network security business to Secure Computing, leaving many customers in the lurch. Now, with this latest acquisition, McAfee is getting a messaging security business (originally Ciphertrust) which [...]

This week Google has announced the Chrome browser. I tried it. It is ok for now – not great – but ok. It’s fast and clean but missing some key features and many sites still don’t work with it. I think the importance of this Chrome browser is what it tells us about Google’s plans [...]

Does anyone out there share my feeling that innovation in network security has become quite scarce? I mean, look at it – the core of network security, the almighty firewall, hasn’t changed in almost 15 years. Not only is it still using the same good old Stateful Inspection to inspect traffic and control it (which [...]

Welcome to my blog… For the past 15 years, I have been heavily involved in the design and implementation of network security technologies for enterprise networks.  In the early 1990s, I was at Check Point where in the process of developing the world’s first commercially successful firewall, I helped create Stateful Inspection, the basis for [...]