People are not appliances, they're flexible

Not to drag up the whole "who needs another agent" thing, but I wanted to comment on an article by Mike Murray the other day and a follow up to that by the guys over at nCircle.  Mike made I think a great point, that as much as we have disdain for the over abundance of agents, we are seeing the same thing with appliances.  This is something I have spoken about for years.  Appliances were supposed to make our lives easier.  Plug and play, no configurations to mess with, easy to use.  For the most part they are.  But as Mike points out, put 3 in, then 6, then 12 and so on and so on.  It is not just security appliances either, everyone seems to jump on the appliance bandwagon.  Now what was supposed to make our lives easier has turned into a data center mess. 

Managing multiple appliances is just not efficient.  On top of this, these appliances are not flexible.  If you want to switch vendors, do a significant upgrade or want to change the technology you are using, you have to throw out the box and start over again.  In spite of the fact that most of these "appliances" are just COTS boxes with a custom bezel, that you pay a premium for.  This was exactly what we tried to avoid at StillSecure by selling a "software appliance" that ran on COTS HW.  You could repurpose, reconfigure and reuse the hardware over and over.  Additionally, the whole virtualization thing flies in the face of the dedicated appliance model.  So, as I said Mike is right on.

The post up on nCircle's blog takes as you can imagine (after all they sell a custom appliance model, off the shelf with a custom bezel) a contrary position. They analogize appliances to people.  Just as we have seen increased specialization in our job roles, the argument is we need increased specialization in appliances.  The reason according to the article is "enterprises like building silos of control".  I see this logic as flawed.  I think no matter how special the person, people are inherently flexible.  They can always be tasked and trained to do another job in addition to what they do or instead of.  In fact humans probably represent the ideal for what we should strive for in designing our technology solutions for flexibility and adaptability. It is this adaptability that has allowed us to evolve and survive these millions of years (please don't start an evolution vs creation thing with me).  Evolution teaches us that too specialized a species is a recipe for extinction. That is what we need from our appliance models, flexibility and adaptability, not more silos!  We need to break down the silos and have interaction among them to improve productivity.