Experts from Gartner have said that the recent 'froth' of M&A activity in the security space does not constitute a 'trend'.   While 'one swallow does not a summer make'  I would contend that this is in fact a trend and that it set to hold for at least another year.  

Why?

Well first of all the 'froth' was in fact more like a large set of Atlantic rollers breaking on the Cape coast!!!
 Consider the number of deals that have taken place in the last 6 months ( see previous blog) crowned by the recent announcement by HP of its acquisition of Arcsight for $1.5bn.



(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e7ace394-bec1-11df-a755-00144feab49a.html)

Secondly see this article also in the FT on how ;




You have to say that security is a growth industry and why would the 'Trend' not continue ???

Have a great weekend.

With over two billon Internet users and five billon mobile phone users these global networks bring people ever closer together. These technologies which include broadband (terrestrial) and 3G (wireless) allow for more and more data to be carried. We have entered the next Tech Cycle which is called the Mobile Internet. It was preceded by four tech cycles starting in the 1960’s with the Mainframe cycle. Approximately every decade thereafter we have had a new cycle; Mini-computers - 70’s; PC’s - 80’s and desktop Internet - 90’s.

The Mobile Internet cycle triggered by the launch of the iPhone will see mobile internet access overtake fixed access by 2014. This will be driven by smart phone take up and 3G/4G rollout. We are already at the critical point of over 1bn 3G users. Other drivers are video ( YouTube); Social networking (Facebook) and VOIP.

Much of this take up is occurring in emerging markets; there are 5 babies born every second - but there are 30 new mobile phones subscribed to every second.
The majority of these users do not have a bank account and so there is and will be a huge need for financial services such as (remittances/money transfer/payment services) to be done via the mobile.

In addition this increasingly connected global community is accelerating its usage of the Internet for commerce, communication, entertainment, trade, governance and so on -- in fact we are rapidly approaching the time that ALL human activity and interaction will 'somehow' be connected to the Internet.

Online fraud and identity theft have become the scourge of the Internet and are mitigating the efficacy of this Mobile Internet ‘revolution’. Now that Facebook has 500m members and issues of privacy and data protection are exercising the minds of Governments and corporations the need for broad based secure identity management and authentication solutions is escalating.
The current practice of using user names and passwords for ‘identification and authentication’ are seen as inadequate and vulnerable to hackers. New solutions are called for !

If you found my previous post somewhat disconcerting then have a look at this link which is the UK Information Commissioners Guide to the new legislation. " The code explains how the Data Protection Act applies to the collection and use of personal data online. It also provides good practice advice for organisations that do business online and are therefore subject to the DPA."

http://www.ico.gov.uk/ebook/ebook.htm

and if you want more in depth information about the legislation itself then have a look at this video from Stewart Room. It makes it somewhat more accessible.

So how do you value your privacy in the Facebook age ?

Does it matter to you that the calls you make, the emails you send, your credit card transactions, the Internet sites you visit, the images of you travelling to work, your social networking posts are now stored at data centres in the Cloud and retrievable by myriad marketers, Government agencies and companies ? None of whom you ever entrusted with your information in the first place. Your digital footprint is a permanent record of your every move.

Data is the pollution of the Information age. Everything we do generates data, and a secondary spin-off of Moores law is that every year it gets cheaper to store and process this data. So rather than sort through our e-mails and delete the ones we don’t need – we just keep them all – it is easier and cheaper to do so. The same thing happens with all of our data now.

Most of ‘your’ data actually belongs to someone else. All of your G-mails, everything you post on Facebook, all of your Amazon transactions – this information belongs to those companies who then harness this information to maximize their advertising revenue and to optimize the selection of products they want you to buy. The data gathered usually has a primary purpose such as the airlines frequent flyer programs where your travel needs are customized (your seating requirements and meal choices ), while its secondary purpose is to target you with a holiday special to some exotic destination, once sold to a 3rd party marketing company.

The data we generate has value – whether to a company seeking to sell us more product or to a Government agency who is trying to track a terrorist cell. The utility of this data depends on its accuracy – so what may be useful to a marketing company such as your age, salary band and postal code will be insufficient for a National Security Agency . Companies are able increasingly to use this data to control their customers. Think about iTunes and the iPhone and how Apple has managed to control the whole eco-system end to end from the device to the content to the retail process. This is not necessarily a bad thing – users are happy to have this managed for them especially as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and complex.

But what happens when you lose control of your data ? When your information is unwittingly exposed to the world. This is a failure of security. But do you care? This is where the issue of the new generation gap becomes relevant. The Internet generation gap. The younger generation seem to be far more relaxed about their information being made public. They are living their lives ‘in public.’ What they did last night at a party is posted onto Facebook either by themselves or their friends. For the whole world to see. This is ‘normal.’

So what seperates these ‘digital natives ‘ (those who have grown up with the Internet, with cell-phones, in the digital age with ubiquitous connectivity) from those of us who grew up when vinyl was still de rigueur , who watched TV according to a schedule; Generation X’ers who grew up in the pre-celebrity era – when football stars were paid a living wage, when videos and CD’s were mainstream. Bruce Shneier believes this divide – this generation gap can be classified as the divide between those who ‘get ‘ Twitter’ and those who don’t. Age is not the measure; your level of acceptance and comfort with the nuances of social media, your fluency with social media, is.

The social norms of the digital natives are created by their environment, the world they were born into. Privacy in the pre-Internet age arose from the inefficiencies of prevailing technologies – telephone calls and letters were difficult to track. Now this has changed and because of the massive processing power of Googles’ search engine and other technological innovations privacy has been significantly diminished. Anyone can Google you and find you on Facebook/Twitter/Googlemail and through your friends and friends of friends they can discover a lot about you. Ask any major HR department when they interview job candidates how they do their ‘checking’ on candidates. There is not even a measure of privacy through obscurity, because even the sheer volume of data out there, is no match for the processing power of search algorithms.

In the past you categorized your friends into different groups with whom your socialized – family, school friends, work colleagues, clubs and so on. There was a natural compartmentalization between these ‘Groups’ - today it is difficult if not impossible to section off your friends into such groups. To control your privacy now you have to explicitly engage with the privacy policy on the social media site / email provider or whatever service you seek online. Many people will accept the default settings just so that they can get on with it – inadvertently leaving big holes in their privacy.

However regulators and law makers are starting to get firmer and they will have to force providers to allow users to opt in rather than to blindly accept default privacy settings. This should prevent some of the recent privacy debacles like the introduction of Google Buzz and Facebooks’ recent efforts at changing its privacy policies which saw the wholesale disclosure of peoples private information including their emails.

A good example of how the Regulators are starting to get to grips with these issues is the Code of Conduct recently published by the Information Commissioner in the UK – linked below. But remember that privacy and security do not equate. Security is about you controlling your information. It is up to your to take back control of your data and not to leave it to others. You need to start thinking more about security and how it can be used to protect your data.

But more of that another time.


LINK TO INFORMATION COMMISSIONERS CODE OF CONDUCT - http://bit.ly/boDtlp