You Need The Speed

I am not trying to pick on Symantec’s Norton Anti Virus.  In today’s commercialized  and commoditized environment, the messages should be catchy, fast and appeal to the common dominators. But this ad allows me to rant on some of the two non-changeable variables couples or opposite pairs that makes data security such an interesting field.

Here are some opposite pairs

• Connectivity versus Security: Good security requires analysis. The more analysis one performs the more latency (aka, less connectivity) occurs. Think about your application needs: pass it fast, or perform Deep Packet Inspection. The more DPI you perform, packets and streams should be queued.
• False Positive versus False Negative: False Positive (FP) disturb the security team and ops team. Security solutions configured to block will interrupt legitimate traffic. On the other hand, avoiding FP can create False Negative (FN) which means that one was able to pass your security systems.
• Thorough versus Fast: Similar to the connectivity versus Security conflicting pair. One would like a system to act fast, on the other hand, think about the TSA agent – in order to perform his job properly, there must be some kind of a long line…
• Enterprise manageability versus Simple-to-use: We all want to live in the fast track, have it all in just “one click” but then enterprise manageability requires many capabilities such as directory integration, load balancing High Availability (HA) etc. Tasks that can not be achieved with just one click.
• Best of breed versus Good enough.  Best of breed requires different vendors and sometimes more work (less “one clicks”) than good enough solutions.

Where does it takes us? Security solutions can’t be like a pie (if it taste good, it’s not healthy). There must be balance between the opposite pairs. Security buyers (home users or enterprise customers) are expecting the right kind of solution that has all the ingredients.

Yes. I do expect it not to slow my system.