Archive for category RSA Conference
Peace, love and free URL filtering
Posted by actiance in New Internet, RSA Conference, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Security on April 16, 2009
Every self-respecting marketing person would dress up like a hippie for the sake of a marketing promotion, right? Well, Sarah Carter and I would, anyway.
You see, here at FaceTime, we’re all about peace, love and free URL filtering. Okay, yes, it’s a promotion we’ve been running for the past couple of months, but we really do feel the love when it comes to helping our customers manage their budgets by eliminating URL filtering renewal fees. Rumor has it there will be a group of protesters at the RSA Conference next week speaking out against those fees so be sure to stop by the FaceTime booth #2339 and check it out. And don’t forget to wear your tie dye.
Seriously, all this commotion and protesting, but we really don’t have anything against URL filtering. Everyone needs URL filtering, it’s just that it’s not enough when it comes to managing the New Internet. A much more granular level of application control is required when it comes to securing and managing Web 2.0 including social networking, multimedia, virtual worlds, VoIP … and the list goes on.
So we’ve been having a lot of fun with our No URL Filtering Fees promotion in our Larissa and Sarah Show episodes. NetworkWorld even called our YouTube videos quirky. We’ll take that as a compliment.
Peace out.
IT Concern over Social Networking: 95%
Posted by actiance in RSA Conference, Social Networking on April 11, 2008
Another RSA event is in the books. It was a good week, and I always find it invaluable to have conversations with the IT mangers that are in the trenches
We also ran what I would describe as a completely unscientific survey, but thought the information would be worth sharing here. We surveyed more than 300 attendees who participated in our theater presentation on Web security, to get their thoughts on a few things. One thing that stood out was their concern over social networking. 95% of the respondents said they were “concerned” (45%) or “very concerned” (40%) about “Users accessing social networking sites from the corporate network.” Of course, this level of concern is to be expected at a security conference. Only 8% said they had “no concerns.”
Is the high level of concern misplaced? This information, along with the general comments of many of the IT people I spoke with suggests that the biggest threat for 2008 is clear: It’s the employees themselves.
Also at RSA, our chief malware researcher, Chris Boyd (aka Paperghost), held a well-attended session with CNET senior news editor Robert Vamosi covering the habits of a new generation of young hackers targeting social networking. In addition to Vamosi’s coverage and Boyd’s VitalSecurity blog, InfoWorld has a nice recap of the session.
Social Networking Goes to Work
Posted by actiance in Product Announcements, RSA Conference, Social Networking on April 7, 2008
It appears that social networking is everywhere these days, and especially on the enterprise network. We’ve unveiled an update to our Unified Security Gateway today, which allows IT managers to control, monitor and report on which applications employees are using within Facebook – over 20,000 applications today. We truly believe that social networking can be a productive business tool, and customers are asking for help as they work to understand it and how to apply it to their business.
As the WSJ’s Business Technology blog commented, some people are still skeptical of how social networking helps businesses. I know I use LinkedIn as my key address book for professional contacts, and know I would be less productive without it. How are you using social networking to do your job? We’ve heard from customers in energy, pharmaceuticals and financials among others that their employees are using it – in some cases it’s the HR teams to run informal background checks on new hire candidates.
We’ll be asking some of these same questions to IT professional at the RSA conference and plan to report back here what we’ve learned. Speaking of RSA, it didn’t get off to a great start for attendees en route from Heathrow. Our own Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research at FaceTime, blogs and shares photos here on a terrifying flight. Glad to report he’s arrived safely in San Francisco.
