Fear Sells 2.0

Steve Lohr posts Enterprise 2.0: A Security Nightmare on the NY Times Bits blog.  Its the kind of fear sells story that is inevitable.  There are apps happenging outside your firewall.  P2P, unauthorized-by-the-enterprise proxies, YouTube and Google Apps.  Underwritten by a firewall 2.0 vendor, they slap the broadest popular monkier on it, Enterprise 2.0, and lo, profit.

Now, Palo Alto Networks may have some good fine grained capabilities, and their PR firm is to be congratulated.  But there are some very basic issues that concern me:

• Every Enterprise 2.0 firm worth their salt has on-site deployment options.  Some like Socialtext have appliances, which give you behind the firewall benefits of SaaS.
• Not everything attributed as a threat in this piece is Enterprise 2.0.  It lumps everything on the web in one bag.  And the more enterprises shun the outside in turbulent times, the less they will adapt to survive it.
• While meeting security requirements is a reasonable part of doing business in this sector, illusions of control do little but erect barriers to collaboration.
• Last time the economy was in a downturn, further muddied by fog of real war, it was a Fear Economy, with vendors only highlighting risk with claims to manage it.  I think we are there again now in popular consciousness, but it is not the case that threat levels have escalated beyond our usual advancing of good policy and practice.

There is a lot more to be said.  There are a lot of quotes about fear and how a person or society deals with it by far wiser men than me.  Recall them, because they are unforgettable.