StoneBlog.stonesoft.com

“The Adventures of Antti Pilvinen” - A story by the RoarinPenguin

DISCLAIMER: All facts, people and companies in this story are fictional and do not have links with any real situation.

Sitting on a bench in Cannes at 6:00 pm in mid-April watching the late afternoon pass by with the sun going down slowly over the la Côte d’Azur, is incredibly relaxing after spending the entire day at the “NetSecure” Security Conference in Palais des Festival. You watch the people walking, talking, chatting, gathering together in a particular atmosphere that seems to exist only in southern France. And the fact that you can do it without wearing a coat and winter clothes makes it so different from Finland!

Antti Pilvinen was immersed in this late afternoon enchantment when he was brought back to reality by a very nice looking blonde woman coming towards him: Jamie Lanuage. They had met during the “Recent Trends in Web Attacks” session delivered this morning by of the numerous vendors sponsoring the conference, and during the coffee break afterwards Antti discovered many things about her using his natural sales social engineering talent.

Jamie was single, very nice looking and working as a project manager for a French company based in Lyon that provides hosted services for private IT clouds. The services are designed for small companies that do not want dedicated internal resources maintaining and securing a cloud computing environment or a large internal IT department. She was very interested in the StoneGate network security platform APSF Oy was offering for layered security in corporate networks, especially considering the StoneGate Management Center grants unified monitoring, centralized log processing, reporting and all of the other great things Antti quickly but efficiently described in the 10 minute break they shared earlier that day.

“Good evening”, she said. “How do you like La Promenade in the late afternoon?”

“Hello”, Antti replied. “Well, it is very beautiful… it gives me the feeling of living in slow-motion.”

“I perfectly understand,” said Jamie. “Even when crowded for events, La Croisette has this retrò atmosphere that gives everything a somewhat slower, relaxing pace. How about an aperitif before dinner? We could continue the interesting discussion we started this morning if you don’t mind…”

“Sure,” concluded Antti as he got up from the bench. “With pleasure.”

Twenty minutes later, Jamie was amazed by all of the interesting things she learned from Antti. He had a fantastic aptitude for being able to speak about technology, transition in just a few seconds to the summer Canoe Safari in Lapland, and get back to network intrusion protection again an instant later. Very enjoyable.

Savoring an icy Ricard, Jamie commented, “it’s amazing and quite funny! I spent two hours yesterday attending a roundtable organized by that ScreenSec market analyst who is certainly a thought leader when it comes to security related recommendations for the enterprise.”

“You mean the one regularly publishing the report called The Big Picture where they rate the most known and innovative security vendors, describing for each excellence, weaknesses, etc?” Antti questioned.

“That one! As a preview to selected attendees in the roundtable, they presented the last edition planned before the summer. What’s funny is they started with the perimeter security one, saying that the big players are ruling the world, although there are few niche innovators such as Stonesoft deserving to be monitored because of the forward looking nature of their roadmap. Then, another part of the report was describing the recent discovery from the IPS niche player Stonesoft of a new species of network attacks, called AETs and the related protection they can offer with that AntiEvasion Ready thingy. And when the discussion turned to cloud computing, they defined Stonesoft as an interesting niche player in securing access to the cloud with their identity and access management solution called StoneGate SSL VPN. Later in the meeting, the speaker highlighted the innovation in ergonomic authentication and secured access to the cloud introduced by a new niche player in the authentication arena: Stonesoft. And last but not least, in the final part of the roundtable they were discussing SIEM consoles, saying that the StoneGate Management Center from the niche player Stonesoft really deserves a mention for the ability to blend centralized log processing from its own as well as third party engines, advanced network monitoring and status surveillance, reporting and statistical view with geolocated information and a complete incident management process helper included.” Jamie asked, “So, would you insist in defining a vendor able to provide such complete architecture a niche player?”

Unleashing his contagious smile, while the sunset was almost over and dusk was surrounding the Promenade, Antti replied: “We can certainly continue this interesting discussion at dinner, but well… niche playing is a… state of mind! Some clever people also call them focused players…”