My birthday and more than 10 years of ICT

So this week was my birthday, 31 now and still fresh, but feeling older sometimes. A good moment to look back at my ICT experiences of the last decade. Yes I was still young when I started with professional ICT. School education was really behind ICT trends. So I learned in the field. My profile is on Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/mvanhalen.
In those times when I started everybody was doing Internet via dialup connection 56k seemed a lot in those days. Nothing compared to the Gigabit INternet connection we use with Payvision and the 100 Mb Internet in the Office. Already more the 3.5 years old. An amazing growth when I think of it from 14 /28 /56K modems to 1 Gigabit.

10things I have seen changing in 10 years are:

1. Security became a big deal. I remember working for a company all workstations had their own IP without firewalls.
2. Servers getting more reliable.
3. Servers are more powerfull but lighter (a very welcome change)
4. Multiple CPU's , servers and Load balencing /clustering are standard.
5. OS and server software became more reliable, scalable and secure
6. .Net Framework development with Microsoft was the best bet we (Payvision) ever took
7. SQL mirroring made life a lot easier.
8. x64 CPU and OS server software gave us scalability
9. Everything is almost virtual. and in 10 years all will be virtual. Even Firewalls, NLB are virtual now. Hardware virtualization would have been very handy 10 years ago (P2V conversion)
10. Microsoft became the good guy and created the best security practices/updating mechanism in teh market.

There is much more, but writing that down would make me feel really old.

See you in 9 years when I look back at 20 years. What will I be writing than?

Some predictions...

• .Net is the most scalable, flexable and powerfull programming language
• Hyper-V is the best virtualization solution
• Windows Mobile is the most used Mobile OS
• Ubuntu obtained a decent market share
• SQL server and Windows 2000something HPC will rule all TPC benchmarks
• TCPIP 6 just got started and has decent marketshare
• Unified communications all the way.
• Akamai and Google got a lot bigger.
• Microsoft released an open source OS. Just to show how its done :)
• I'll have a lot more grey hears... not that I have plenty now :)

Let me know what you think. What have you seen last 10 years and how will the ICT world be in 10 more years.

Forefront Threat Management Gateway - full protection circle

As you might know Microsoft is (beta) releasing a new product called Forefront Threat Management Gateway (Forefront TMG) code name "Stirling". Forefront TMG is the successor of ISA server 2006. Being in the technology an security business I couldn't resist myself to test drive it on a virtual Hyper-V guest.

The reason I couldn't resist myself is simple Forefront TMG completes the circle. It can work together with Forefront Client Security, another Microsoft Anti-Virus desktop product.

What makes Forefront TMG an intresting product is that is has built in HTTP traffic scanning for malware and signatures. It introduces an extra layer of defense. Which is needed because rolling out and testing important updates for windows or other import products like Adobe and SUN (Java) takes time. And in that time clients may get infected or worse.

But the good news doesn't stop there. It's also able to detect infected or not properly protected clients and put them in quarantine and more. And if you check my previous post you'll see it works very well and is more then welcome.

Another good thing is that Microsoft release updates for Forefront TMG in sync with their own update services. So it will be a must have from a security perspective.

What's nice as well that is 100% Hyper-V compatible. Making a test scenario very easy.

Offcourse antivirus protection on ISA server or firewall level is already possible but not with interaction with desktop software. In the mean time you can use a product like GFI webmonitor or similar

A good step Microsoft took to a safer digtal world.

What do you think?