I haven't seen much of the Firewalls, Anti-Virus and IDS are Dead technologies recently, Mind you I have been extremely busy with other things of late.
The short version is that I am ready to proclaim that nothing is dead. That's right. No matter how hard we try to get away from mainframes or Windows NT or whatever. Most of us have to deal with things on a regular basis. So get over it.
What should be dead is calling different technologies dead. Especially since there will always be a reason to use whatever "it" is, even if the reason is a bad one.
There are couple reasons for this. The finance guys don't have a lot of patience for needing to spend $1 Million at the beginning of the year and then reading in *Business* magazine by *expert* that *technology* is now on a slab.
The reality of it is that the uninitiated gets upset. It also upsets me. But for different reasons. Here are a group of people (security staff) in a company who have probably fought for months to bring something in, get it installed and operating. Only for some blow hole to come through and make an uninformed opinion about everyone's environment.
The aforementioned blow hole comes with credibility, because they are published. The people on staff probably not. I don't hate the blow hole though because they are trying to sell magazines and announcing the death of whatever sells X publication.
It all comes down to profiling the risks to your organization. If you are a decision maker, take advice from industry rags with a grain of salt. If you are in the trenches, be sure that your business cases are tight and the deciders know what the technology does and the risks it is mitigating.
That is all.
