Articles by 'Ken Phelan'

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

As a consultant, I give a lot of advice. There’s one piece of advice that I never give. I’ll never tell you to quit your job, not to your face anyway. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, your company is paying for the advice, not you, so professionally I need to act in their best interests. Secondly, it’s generally precluded by the contracts I have with my customers. Thirdly, it’s just kind of a jerk move. But frankly, it’s one of the things I’m often thinkin... read more.

• December 13, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

77% of internet traffic is now encrypted. That number has been increasing steadily over time and it appears that it will continue to increase. What does it mean to us as security professionals when we’re dealing with an increasingly dark internet? Traditional network products are ineffective at examining encrypted traffic. That means we’ll have to decrypt it for them. We have a limited number of precious places to look at traffic in its unencrypted state. Notably, proxies and end-points. End... read more.

• November 21, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

Computers beating humans in chess isn’t news. What may be news to some people is that the best chess player isn’t a computer or a human. It’s a human using a computer. In chess circles, they call this human-computer team strategy a centaur. We have some man-versus-machine problems in Cyber Security as well. We use computers effectively to record and process large numbers of incidents. There are so many incidents that no human can possibly look at them all, so we ask the computers to find... read more.

• September 19, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in

Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ be ‘No’. For whatever is more than these is from the evil one. Mathew 5:37 At Gotham, we sell a lot of products and consulting to a lot of customers (thankfully). We get to see many of them succeed and we’ve unfortunately seen some fail. We try to share that experience to make our customers as successful as possible. Sometimes we even write blogs so that random strangers can potentially be more successful. That&rsqu... read more.

• June 22, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in

Over time, the value we get from a piece of software generally increases. The software matures. There are more features and, hopefully, fewer bugs. More importantly, we simply use it better. It’s fully deployed. We’ve figured out where and why to use it in our organization. Once we’ve been in production for a couple of years, it’s like any other relationship. We may look wistfully at some green grass on the other side of the fence every now and then, but we’re happy with the de... read more.

• June 13, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Training

The Challenger Channel I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where a speaker talked about The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson. She encouraged us to read it and of course, I did. The book has several great insights about the current B2B selling environment and since that’s what Gotham does for a living I found it very interesting. Two of the author’s key insights are: Customers are more consensus driven than ever. On average there will be 5.4 decision makers at each customer for ea... read more.

• May 17, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in

The Challenger Channel I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago where a speaker talked about The Challenger Customer by Brent Adamson. She encouraged us to read it and of course, I did. The book has several great insights about the current B2B selling environment and since that’s what Gotham does for a living I found it very interesting. Two of the author’s key insights are: Customers are more consensus driven than ever. On average there will be 5.4 decision makers at each customer for ea... read more.

• May 17, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

Ransomware is all the rage in the news as more and more people are hit by this particularly tough form of malware. I thought I would walk through one of the more prevalent attack patterns and provide some suggestions on how to combat this. Let me start off by saying that the ransomware attack is advanced and designed to get through most of the existing security products that are on the market. But since it’s in the news, every security vendor is talking about how they stop ransomware. It’s a common problem... read more.

• April 18, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

There’s a lot of interest in new converged hardware platforms for VDI. Converged platforms present a scalable architecture where you grow capacity by adding devices that provide both compute and storage capabilities. This would be in comparison to more traditional architectures. People used to just buy servers with disk in them. These were fine as far as they went, but over time, it was a hassle to manage each individual box. Along came storage area networks and servers were relegated to providing the compu... read more.

• April 04, 2016

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

I was at the RSA show a couple of weeks ago and my plane reading included The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black Swans are big things that happen unexpectedly, and having happened, change our world significantly. 9/11 was a Black Swan. So was Lehman. In the context of the RSA show, it was hard not to draw some parallels to the new breed of advanced cyber-attacks. Human beings are pattern seeking animals. We’re naturally predisposed to take the noise that everyday life is made of and turn it into... read more.

• March 11, 2016