Security Pie

Please note some of the answers that I do not like to hear:

• I’ll do it first thing in the morning.
• We can’t do it. We never did it before.
• It looks too difficult so we decided to leave it as-is.
• We can’t change this now. We just did it (wrongly…) some time ago.

I like the following answers:

• I’ll see how we can do it at the fastet way.
• We never did it before but we should try. Let me see how.
• Let’s think about a different way to solve this problem.
• We just did it wrong last time. We need to change it now.

RSA Conference, the biggest security event of the year will take place next month.

IMO now is a good time to review how we are doing as an industry, fulfilling our destination (that is, securing).

On Jone 2003, Gartner declared that IDS are dead and “recommends that enterprises redirect the money they would have spent on IDS toward defense applications such as those offered by thought-leading firewall vendors that offer both network-level and application-level firewall capabilities in an integrated product.”

6.5  years later, are we there yet?

The Heroes

So Marvel is getting acquired by Disney ($4 billion and some change). Personally, I like the idea. It will make life easier as now I do not have to think who owns a specific comic character. If Marvel shareholders approve the deal, they would receive $30 per share in cash and 0.745 shares of Disney for each share of Marvel that they hold. The deal is valued at $50 per Marvel share, more than a 29% premium, based on Friday’s closing price. Shares of Marvel (MVL) soared 26% in morning trading.

But the story is even better. Marvel, once a bankrupt company and the target of a how-to-mess-a-company book that was acquired for $82 m (and change) is now sold.

“When Ron Perelman bought Marvel in 1989, he described the company, home to heroes like Captain America and the Fantastic Four, as “a mini-Disney in terms of intellectual property.” His junk bonds and grandiose expansion plans swiftly raised Marvel’s market value to over $3 billion, but also brought its debt past $600 million, at which point corporate raider Carl Icahn smelled blood. He managed to wrest control of the company from Perelman, but the takeover process dragged Marvel through bankruptcy court for years. “

As a person interested in business strategy, I can only admire the level of thoughts, planning and execution my colleagues delivered. (I’m also jealous for the amount of fun and satisfaction they had during this fun ride).