Actually one of the most entertaining panel discussions at the Hosting Transformation Summit in London this week was titled Eco-Efficient Datacenters: Where’s the Money? Panel members included Jeff Lowenberg (The Planet), Michael Winterson (Equinix), Lex Coors (InterXion BV) and Tony Day (APC). The panel was moderated by Andy Lawrence at the 451 Group.

Judging by the debate, the European hosting companies have a fight on their hands keeping the politicians out of the datacenter. With green issues being even higher on the political agenda than in North America, and the vast energy requirements of modern data centers becoming more widely known, there are some legislators and “Eurocrats” sniffing an opportunity to add to the hoster’s power headaches. Never mind the fact that escalating power hosts are incentive enough for these companies to be as efficient as possible.

The panel discussion ranged widely between big picture green issues, and the technical challenges of retrofitting older data centers to be less power hungry. There are many incremental improvements to be had, but Tony Day pointed out that the biggest and most immediate savings are to be had simply by running our data centers hotter.

The American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers say data centers can operate at 77F. Most modern rack-mounted computers can run happily a long way higher than that, and yet most data centers are cooled to the high sixties (many of our customers now use EM7 to trend the environmental fluctuations across their data centers using environmental probes as well as readings from the servers themselves).

For the hosting companies this is a matter of educating their customers, so that raising the data center temperatures is seen as a welcome green move rather than a lowering of quality of service.

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TJX Companies, the mammoth US retailer whose substandard security led to the world’s biggest credit card heist, has fired an employee after he left posts in an online forum that made disturbing claims about security practices at the store where he worked.

Security was so lax at the TJ Maxx outlet located in Lawrence, Kansas, that employees were able to log onto company servers using blank passwords, the fired employee, Nick Benson, told The Register. This policy was in effect as recently as May 8, more than 18 months after company officials learned a massive network breach had leaked the details of more than 94 million customer credit cards. Benson said he was fired on Wednesday after managers said he disclosed confidential company information online.

Other security issues included a store server that was running in administrator mode, making it far more susceptible to attackers. He said he brought the security issues to the attention of a district loss prevention manager name Allen in late 2006, and repeatedly discussed them with store managers. Except for a stretch when IT managers temporarily tightened password policies, the problems went unfixed.

So happy shiny Liquidmatrix Security Digest readership…

Is he a Blogtard or a Hero?

… and do you have a published, communicated, and monitored employee policy on blogging about your company?

Tags: TJX, Blogtard, Whistleblower, Internet Asshattery

Good article by Neil Roiter from Information Security Magazine on NAC moving ahead as the hype subsides. For a change from other articles we have read recently, Neil gives a true to life, no holds barred assessment of where NAC is in the market.  I think some of the comments from Lawrence Orans over at Gartner are right on.  However, one he misses is in talking about the Cisco-Microsoft NAC partnership. I think the TCG-Microsoft partnership has replaced that one and Cisco is going to join that party through the NEA. 

For me though the quote of the article was this one by Brendan O'Connell, Cisco's product line manager for NAC, "NAC is an Easter egg hunt. Policy lives in a lot of different places .."  So does that make Cisco the NAC Easter Bunny? Seriously, policy does live in a lot of different places.  I think eventually the answer lies in marrying network based admission control policies with endpoint based configuration policies.  This is an area that is ripe for interaction and integration.  I also think that Symantec talking about customers want a NAC solution, but not another console or another agent was a bit ironic.  Just because you lump your agents together doesn't mean you have not added yet more overhead to the equation.  Anyone who has used Symantecs new Endpoint Security with all of the mods turned on can talk to you about overhead and resource use. Whether the agent is separate or not, it is what the overhead is that counts.

In any event, though Neil did not mention StillSecure (tsk, tsk) I thought this article was right on, that despite the naysayers and the inflated hype, NAC is being adopted in the market. It is maturing and most of all it is providing value to customers.

Good article by Neil Roiter from Information Security Magazine on NAC moving ahead as the hype subsides. For a change from other articles we have read recently, Neil gives a true to life, no holds barred assessment of where NAC is in the market.  I think some of the comments from Lawrence Orans over at Gartner are right on.  However, one he misses is in talking about the Cisco-Microsoft NAC partnership. I think the TCG-Microsoft partnership has replaced that one and Cisco is going to join that party through the NEA. 

For me though the quote of the article was this one by Brendan O'Connell, Cisco's product line manager for NAC, "NAC is an Easter egg hunt. Policy lives in a lot of different places .."  So does that make Cisco the NAC Easter Bunny? Seriously, policy does live in a lot of different places.  I think eventually the answer lies in marrying network based admission control policies with endpoint based configuration policies.  This is an area that is ripe for interaction and integration.  I also think that Symantec talking about customers want a NAC solution, but not another console or another agent was a bit ironic.  Just because you lump your agents together doesn't mean you have not added yet more overhead to the equation.  Anyone who has used Symantecs new Endpoint Security with all of the mods turned on can talk to you about overhead and resource use. Whether the agent is separate or not, it is what the overhead is that counts.

In any event, though Neil did not mention StillSecure (tsk, tsk) I thought this article was right on, that despite the naysayers and the inflated hype, NAC is being adopted in the market. It is maturing and most of all it is providing value to customers.