In the immortal words of David Byrne:
Look, I love my brother from a different mother, and as entertaining as I find Amrit's latest blog on the end of the world due to the world economic malaise, I can't help but remember the last time this happened at the end of the dot-com bubble.
You might say that it's never been this bad. You might be right. However, we've all weathered storms before and while things certainly change -- and not always for the best -- security will survive. It may look a little different, however. Meh.
As I have both said and experienced previously, situations such as this will deliver new regulations and oversight, more compliance requirements, stretched/reduced budgets and a streamlining in role, process, function and technology. It's the flatlining function in the pulse before the CPR kicks in.
Amrit's predictions are interesting, but all of these things were happening well BEFORE the financial crisis hit as part of the normal cycle of punctuated equilibrium. Seriously, we've seen this behavior for the last four years already.* To paraphrase Amrit's "predictions:"
- Innovation will come to a grinding halt
- Coming regulations will add to compliance madness
- Enterprises will instantiate process/capability maturity and efficiency models
- Companies will move more functions/services to outsourced partners and grapple with SLA, ownership and portability issues.
- Vendors will quickly grasp at the latest buzzword in order to maintain relevance such as virtualization, SaaS, Cloud, etc.
So again, which of these weren't already happening?
Times are tough. So are we.
See you Monday.
/Hoff
P.S. Buried in the comments is the most profound point I have to make in response to Amrit:
You know how I know this isn't the end of the [security] world? You [Amrit] and I -- people who make a career by squawking on blogs -- still have jobs
* To make it clear, because I've obviously done a poor job understanding Amrit's points, I'm not suggesting that the impacts of the last few months aren't taking a toll. I'm suggesting, however, that the crisis(es) are acting as an accelerant delivering more quickly the outcomes of things already in motion. Further, as I mentioned in the comments, while innovation is certainly delivered from the tech. startup community, it's also driven from corporations when necessity pushes for innovation and innovative solutions even due to reasons like cost control...