Good Morning:
At this point, I'm probably chewing my arm off - ready to head back home and get back to my daily routine. I've come to embrace the fact that even if I didn't have to work - I still would. The life of leisure just isn't for me. I'm not the type to want to play golf every day or sit at the pool or out by the beach.

It's not that I don't appreciate the ability to turn things off and just relax a bit. It's important. But it's not something I want to or could do for months at a time. I'm a builder. I like to create new things and creating a lower golf handicap is not really what I'm talking about. As I mentioned on Monday of this week. It's not something I feel bad about either.

So over the next two days, I'll be ramping back up to jump into my routine. By Monday, we'll be back at the home base. The kids will be gearing up for another couple weeks at camp, and I'll be back to being pulled in 15 directions. And I can't wait.

Yes, vacation is great. But if you aren't looking forward to getting back to your life, then you need to change your life. Have a great day.

Incite #9: Get the Jumper Cables for DLP

Data leak prevention stalls in 2008, continuing to be a solution looking for a problem. Given its complexity, limited ability to protect intellectual property, and early consolidation by Big Security, the technology is stuck in the early adopter phase. Significant regulatory catalysts are balanced by an uncertain spending environment, which forces users to utilize the built-in filtering within email and web gateways. These solutions are largely good enough to make sure a dimwit doesn’t send a SSN# (or other regular expression) outside of the organization.

Read the original Days of Incite post on this topic.

6-month grade: C+

I hate waffling, but ultimately I have no choice but to waffle a bit on this Incite. Clearly I don't think the DLP market is going great guns, and I constantly hear anecdotes about big DLP projects being pushed out or pilots kind of stuck in pilot mode. Yet, on the other hand, I also hear anecdotes about some of the acquired DLP vendors beating their internal projections, mostly driven by the reach of the acquiring company. I guess the truth is kind of in the middle and very hard to really calibrate.

That's why I hate making market size projections. I guess I'll take a mental note to remember that next year, when I'm preparing the 2009 Incites.

But let's get back to the fundamentals of the DLP space. The reality is, as this business and the product offerings mature, the problems is less about catching bad stuff at the gateway and more about protecting the data at rest. That's really where it's most vulnerable. I should probably say FINDING the sensitive data at rest, since you need to figure out where it is before you can worry about protecting it.

And that gets back to a key hallmark about DLP, is that it's more about process than it is about a product. Sure you can buy a gateway to look for regular expressions (like SSN#'s and account IDs) or even use some sophisticated information fingerprinting algorithm, but unless you know what you are trying to protect and why - then the inherent value of the DLP will be limited.

I think that's really the concept I was trying to isolate in the Incite, but of course it came out like a Kimbo uppercut delivered to the jaw of the entire category. My point is that without a process to allow data leak prevention to actually prevent anything, you need to have an underlying process to figure out what's important, find it, and then ultimately protect it.

And without the process, the product is a pretty (I guess I should say a VERY) expensive way to find the low hanging fruit, and your existing mail and web gateways can probably find the low hanging fruit.

Photo credit: "Old Jumper Cables" by Dann Solo