2 posts tagged “information infrastructure”

I'll admit I'm the last one I know who's jumped on the Gmail bandwagon, but I did so just as it was on the cusp of opening up to the world. After a few days of use it is clearly superior to the other offerings available and if Yahoo! and Microsoft don't get their heads back in the game they'll both lose more than just me as a customer.

Lets talk about information security for a minute, I'm not sure how to handle this but since the Execs were happy to mention it to the press at the RSA Conference and the news had leaked anyway we might as well spend some digital ink on PowerPath's upcoming encryption option. PowerPath Data At Rest Encryption is one of those no-brainer wins you only consider to be a no-brainer win after someone else has mentioned it to you.

There's a lot of unencrypted data sitting out on storage already, how to do you realistically apply encryption in a reasonable amount of time without having to install racks of in-band encryption boxes? You use PowerPath Migration Enabler to do it for you. 

What about Key Management? EMC already has a battle tested key management system with RSA Key Manager. What will all this give you? It'll give you encrypted data from the moment it leaves the host for the storage, it'll never be clear on the wire.

What about information security before it leaves the host? Thats where RSA Database Security Manager & RSA File Security Manager come in. That's where RSA SecurID, RSA Access Manager and RSA Certificate Manager come in.

How do you deal with the events these and the other products in your environment will generate? How will you ensure compliance, audit & security integrity and so on? That's where RSA enVision comes in.

If you didn't get the message loud and clear at the RSA Conference I'll repeat it for you. EMC is in the information business, information security is but one dimension of information protection and like all the other dimensions it's something the company is going all in on. I'm looking at the value prop and the depth of technologies available and I see a bunch of things which are going to leave EMC's competitors in the dirt.

That's not swagger & bravado, it's the fact that there's a scarcity in the security market of companies who can offer such a product range under the same letter head on the same paper.

HDS's Claus Mikkelsen is usually one to talk trash about EMC, he is a former IBM man after all and after the kicking EMC gave IBM while he was working for Big Blue I'd expect nothing less than seething resentment, but he wrote an entry many weeks ago the contents of which I found bizarre. Lets take this for example.

I would certainly say it is NOT to build on their core storage business since their track record for integrating their acquisitions is quite poor, which for their customers, exacerbates the problem the rest of us are trying to solve, which is simplifying their storage infrastructure.

Ummm, no. HDS may be in the business of simplifying storage infrastructure because that's all they have to sell, but EMC is in the business of helping people simplify their information infrastructure, and that means doing a hell of a lot more than just dropping tin on tiles.

When you're an array only company every problem has a storage controller solution, every answer involves integrating something into the array, but when you're an information company tin is part of the solution.

This isn't relevant to Claus in this instance but anytime I read an EMC competitor floating the idea that EMC is getting out of the storage business I wonder if in the next paragraph they're going to ask Santa for a Race Car or a Pony.

If they're going to engage in wishful thinking they might as well ask for things which they stand a chance of getting.