Citrix’s Mark Templeton Keynotes at Interop Las Vegas ’08

April 30th, 2008 by Rajiv Patnam

Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix delivered today’s opening keynote. His comparison of the best way to build an on demand system is DirecTV…Interesting comparison, stating that they give on demand control to the user, similar to how non IT departments are spending money on Web 2.0 technologies.

One principle that he wants to get across is that you have a web application that follows a delivery architecture built around an access gateway, around the delivery center, a repeater to improve signal/speed, and then another set of access controls around the user. He’s tied this around the Citrix platforms, including Netscaler MPX.

The key principle he wants to get across is to turn the datacenter into a delivery center, meaning that the purpose of a datacenter is to deliver applications to users. He mentions monitoring and security a number of times, but never mentions how security and monitoring works over the Citrix platform.

Definitely a nice start to this keynote session around Web 2.0. The delivery and security he mentioned needs to be designed ahead of time rather than be added along later. This becomes increasingly important in the ‘Web 2.0’ world.

Up next, the panel on Security in Web 2.0 led by:

• John McNulty Chairman and CEO, Secure Computing Corporation
• Dmitri Alperovitch Director, Intelligence Analysis and Hosted Security, Secure Computing Corporation
• Gary Dobbins Director – Information Security, University of Notre Dame
• Gary L. Hodge CTO, U.S. Bank

Hodge: Web 2.0 has created a new world of security issues for Banks, as their devices are now available 7/24 to the internet. They’ve spent time locking down things better on the inside/old secure zone. Their concerns are around Smart Phones, Web 2.0 as they’ve spent 15 years getting a secure PC environment.

Dobbins: Info Security started in 2002 for Notre Dame. His challenge is to implement security without letting anyone know about it because of academic freedom.

Alperovitch: Works on Malware, web, email based threat detection.

The threat/cyber criminals are no longer “18 year old” play hackers. It’s now mostly an organized crime based issue. The individuals that are arrested, often have long rap sheets and many have violent crime and drug use. Their has also been a growth in cybercrime to recruit and finance terrorist activities. The silly damaging of a website era is over…. Very interesting point. This change in direction means that the number of cybercrimes we’re seeing is only going to increase. I think this ties directly into Mark’s speech where this level of security has to be built and planned when applications first get built rather than being tied in later or being applied at the network level.

Hodge: ROI on Security – Doesn’t generate revenue, so difficult to pull this together.

Dobbins: ROI on security – they measure by looking at their threat level.

Dobbins also mentions that what makes things easy for him is their managements understanding that there is not a simple way to measure ROI, but rather the threat. This issue is one that’s especially prevalent in today’s economy. It’s tough for an IT manager/CIO/CTO to justify expensive costs in IT where IT doesn’t generate revenue. Instead of an ROI based justification we should start looking at the cost of failure. The justification has to be built around this or we’ll continue to see this growth.

Dmitri just raised an interesting point, that Web 2.0 creates a whole new host of issues, as we’re now using the browser is now the new OS. A need has been created to scan and more on the application level, as even though data is being passed through a single pipe, port 80, the applications have tremendous control, and remote access. Interestingly all of the panelists say that securing web applications and protecting the browser is the most important issue other than educating the users.

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