Where’s Sally?

I’m a little worried, Sally Whittle’s blog – Getting Ink – keeps asking me for a password which I don’t have, and then casting aspersions on my credentials (well, I guess the second part is less surprising).

Anyone know what’s up over there?

Among Esteemed Company

A quick note to any tech bloggers who may stumble across this page, practice using very long words and referencing obscure characters from Greek mythology…

The ranks of UK tech bloggers have been swollen by the first post from all round national treasure, Stephen Fry. Some may say that a first post on smartphones that runs to over 5000 words sets his own bar pretty high – the man is notoriously busy – and there’s also no predicting if Stephen’s blog will be a strictly tech blog. Although anyone who saw Fry’s incredibly touching documentary on bi-polar disorders (a condition he suffers from himself) will already be aware that he has voracious appetite for gadgetry, from the Apple stable in particular – Fry claims to own the second Mac sold in the UK (the first belonging to Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy).

As you might expect, Fry peppers his post with the kind of uber-intellectual references that we’ve become accustomed to, even signing off with the ‘General Confession in the Book of Common Prayer’. Unusual, I’m sure you’ll agree.

All Gone Mad…

Many of you will already be painfully aware of how difficult it can be to get any kind of fun out of 600 words on information security. But I fear I share TWL’s disbelief that anyone would go to such tenuous extremes as to link Monty Python to BS7799.

All this headscratching comes from an article in BIOS, which opens with a corker:

Monty Python and The Holy Grail made Ben Hur look like an epic…

Well, as far as I’m aware, Ben Hur is an epic – and is so without the Monty’s help. But that’s just being picky. The real fun starts with this, and I’m sure you all recognise the scene…

Prince Herbert’s father is proudly showing his son the kingdom he will inherit. He tells the Prince: ‘All I had when I started was swamp…other kings said I was daft, but I built my castle all the same, just to show ‘em. It sank into the swamp. So I built another one…that sank into the swamp. I built another one…that burnt down, fell over and sank into the swamp. So I built another, and that stayed up…’

Now, there all all sorts of accurate analogies that can be drawn from that scene, about forward planning, about expectation management, well – about loads of stuff. And, according to Jason Holloway of ExaProtect, about IT security…

The lesson is to build the security fortress on solid foundations, using established security frameworks such as COBIT, COSO, ITIL, BS7799 / ISO17799 or the newer ISO27001. These help you implement robust IT and security management processes and determine your control indicators for ongoing security and governance procedures. So your security processes won’t sink into the mud at the first challenge.

It goes on (and on), finding parallels between The Knights who say ”ni” and access to log files, between Lancelot’s crusading flight to the castle tower and false positives from IDS/IPS systems…

At the time of this post, there were no comments on the article, the picture had already formed in my head of hundreds of IT professionals in front of their machines scratching their heads and double-checking that it’s not April 1st.