Good Morning:
Week 2 of "vacation" is on. The last time I took off more than a week was back in 1997. The Boss and I took a 3 week trip to Australia and New Zealand a few months after we got married. It's been a long time. I guess part of me should feel bad about not really taking vacation and totally unplugging. I probably should just not work at all, not do any reading, not plug in and answer a few emails every day. Not work on any of my super-secret projects. But I don't feel bad. Not at all.

Why? Because I love what I do. I don't spend a portion of every day reading because I worry I'll fall behind. I do it because it's what I like to do. I'm an information junkie and I've found a profession that lets me indulge that. I love writing and inflicting my opinions on all that will listen. I love building new things, so my new projects keep me engaged.

The fact that I have enough back-up to "work" a few hours a day is lucky. So I can get my info fix and then spend the afternoon with the kids at the beach. And a couple of hours of beach time is about all I can handle anyway. Especially since I have no pool to lounge by and no one to bring me drinks in a pineapple.

Yes, I'm spoiled. I don't feel bad about that either. Have a great day.

Incite #6: Laptop encryption hits the big leagues

Since remote employees insist on losing laptops and the Government insists on notifying customers when private information is lost, security teams respond by rolling out full disk encryption far and wide. Within two years, this market disappears, first because every endpoint security suite will include a FDE option (2008) and later because the operating system makers (Microsoft and Apple) do a good enough job (2009) to kill stand-alone offerings.

Read the original Days of Incite post on this topic.

6-month grade: A-

Yep, this one seemed very obvious when I wrote it. Though in a time of macro-economic chaos, and even the mighty (like VMWare) proving that trees don't grow to the sky, good old fashion disk encryption continues to do well. Well enough to keep big security afloat and announcing good earnings? That I'm not sure about (remember I wrote this about two weeks ago before many of the public security players announced their earnings), but I can tell you it would be a lot worse without the ballast of this hot category.

And why is it hot? Well, just read the Incite. People keep losing laptops and disclosure laws mean customers need to be notified. It's a lot easier to just encrypt the disk and most companies are realizing that. Of course, you see datapoints from a few months ago that the US Government is about 1/3 of the way through their deployment and you realize how many friggin' devices there are out there, and that there is still plenty of running room for this category.

I'll also pat myself a bit on the back by saying the longer term prediction part of the Incite seems on track as well. There are precious few stand-alone device encryption companies left and many of them have shacked up with Big Security to OEM their offerings through a bigger distribution engine (like the Symantec/GuardianEdge deal). Of course, the good news about long term predictions is that they are longer term and thus I can just say it's right. Right?

But what about having the embedded OS capabilities kill stand-alone offerings by next year. That's the difference between A- and A. Microsoft's Vista is every bit the train wreck we thought and a lot of big companies are just going to wait for the next version of Windows. That means no BitLocker, which means continued demand for 3rd party offerings. And as many inroads as Apple is making in the enterprise, it's still a rounding error. So 2009 may turn out to be a bit optimistic. But to be clear, good enough will prevail in this game. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

Photo credit: "Laptop Stolen" by Bahi_P