Articles by 'Ken Phelan'

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

One of the things that will pump a little adrenaline into an average Tuesday morning at Gotham is a call from one of our clients in the midst of a genuine cyber crisis. Unfortunately, these calls are more and more common, so I thought I’d spend a few minutes talking about some things you can do get prepared for such a call. I’m glad you’re calling me, but I’d prefer that you also had some type of Cyber Crisis Plan that you prepared for such an occasion. I know it’s customary at this point to spend a para... read more.

• December 16, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

The future of virtual desktops seems a little murky right now. In 2008 Gartner predicted that 40% of desktops would be virtualized by 2010. They continued to predict this target over the next several years and were still maintaining as late as 2012 that 40% of corporate desktops would be virtualized by 2013. After several years of stretching for this goal, in 2012 the rubber band seemed to snap. Brian Madden, one of the top VDI pundits, published his book “The VDI Delusion”. The book seemed to claim that... read more.

• December 04, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

Every business builds itself around the needs for three constituencies - customers, employees, and owners. The CEO acronym is an easy way to remember them. There is always a balance, but generally one of them has a priority role. Customer-driven businesses start with customer experience as their priority. A lot of retail organizations have this focus. Nordstrom’s comes to mind. Service industry’s often make employees a priority, knowing that a good employee will make the service product shine. Starbucks... read more.

• November 06, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Infrastructure

Facebook announced a program this week to have their employees live with 2G data access speeds on Tuesdays (2G Tuesdays). This gives their employees perspective on what it’s like to use Facebook in an emerging market like India. I love this. How many times have you complained to a developer about the speed of their product only to hear them tell you how great the product performs for them? Well, good for you and your super-high-end PC with the local data store. A few years ago, I abandoned my noteb... read more.

• October 28, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

One of the things I like really like about my job is that I spend a lot of time out of my office, visiting clients. Conference calls and web meetings are fine, but nothing communicates like a face-to-face interaction. When you go to someone’s office you simply understand the situation better. One of the telling things I often run into in this physical inspection is something I call Cap-X bloat. Many organizations are fine when it comes to buying things, but they often don’t have the time to implement the... read more.

• October 15, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

There are a lot of new products emerging to secure the end point. This makes sense given the nature of the attacks we’re seeing, but it’s also leading to some confusion. I thought I would try help out with some categorization. Category 1: Signature-based defenses. These are traditional anti-virus and malware products. The signature-based solutions have a serious problem – or rather a deadly combination of two problems. There are so many new signatures that it becomes more and more expensive to manage the... read more.

• September 28, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

It’s a longstanding joke among technologists. The only problem with technology is the people who use it. I think the joke needs an update. The only problem with technology platforms is applications. I was talking to some of my virtual desktop friends the other day. We were talking about their challenges in keeping a stable platform in the face of the corporate chaos. Every day brings new underlying challenges. There are new applications. There are new security requirements on a regular basis. Even the fo... read more.

• September 08, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Uncategorized

I was out at Black Hat last week and I thought I’d sum up some of the things I learned for those of you who couldn’t make it - Top 10 things I learned at Black Hat: Hackers don’t look like they do in the movies. Well, some do, but not the majority of them. Hacking is less emo than you think. It’s also more boring than it looks on the movies. It’s really a long process of finding vulnerabilities in an environment and matching them to exploits. It’s more like data analysis than playing some kind of vid... read more.

• August 19, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

If you are in a position where you either give or receive IT Security audits, please stop what you’re doing and read this right now (if you haven’t already). It’s the 2014 security audit by OPM’s inspector general office of audits. Katherine Archuleta resigned last Friday as head of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and I’m guessing she wishes she had read it a little more carefully. My experience indicates that a large of percentage of people reading this line ignored my admonition to read the... read more.

• July 17, 2015

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Virtualization

My daughter Joyce is graduating this week with a Master’s Degree in Occupational Therapy (#joytheot). Joyce has spent some time educating me on Occupational Therapy, and one of the concepts that I really like is OT’s position on Client Centered Care. I think there is a message there for us in the IT industry. Client Centered Care starts with getting its goals directly from the client. If I was to be in some kind of accident, the healthcare industry would work to put me back together. They would try to re... read more.

• June 02, 2015