Stuck at Home

My wife is out of the country this week and that leaves me to take care of my 3 wonderful children.

As a business owner, I thought I had a busy life. It nothing like the schedules of 3 kids. Between dance class, field trips, homework, baths and various other items it can fill up the day. The morning can be stressful with making lunches and depending on mood. The other thing is that I get kind of lonely. I am so use to meeting people that I am not use to being by myself.

I thought my wife had it easy, but I realize she does not. On top of all that, I still had client issues to take care off. I had a few clients schedule something without telling me and then expect my help with it. I am usually OK with it, but when I focus on the clients, then I take away from time with the kids and it is not fare to my kids.

I was a little worried as this is the longest I have been without my wife. Overall, it has been good. The kids and I get along well and I feel bonded to them again. My life balance has really been shifted towards work lately and I my kids feel the effects of that.

I am working to have a better balance of work/home life. Karl Palachuk discusses this in his book relax, focus succeed (Check out his blog here.) I am working on implementing some of the idea's in that book.

The other nice thing, is with high speed Internet and with access to all my systems from anywhere, it makes it very easy to work from home. But it can also be a bad thing as it is too easy to slip into bad habits.

Overall, I give credit to my wife, Susan. She deals with a lot and usually has a smile on her face.

UTM Firewall's

I think everyone making a security decision surrounding firewalls, IDS/IPS or web filtering should consider UTM Firewall's.

UTM stands for Unified Threat Management. A UTM firewall not only permits or deny's packets, it can also scrub the content in those packets. It can scan the traffic for a virus, spyware/malwares, an malicious attack and stop spam

Some can also stop Instant Messenger traffic or allow it and log the traffic for review later. You can also filter good employee's from doing bad things with the built in web filtering.

The other great feature is the price point. A few years ago, most of these would have been purchased as separate appliances and would have had to been managed separately. That was cost prohibitive for most small to medium businesses. Today those same businesses can purchase a nice UTM firewall and have the same protection most large companies own, at a fraction of the price.

Most small to medium businesses have no idea what is happening on their Internet connection. From illegal downloads to wasted company time, putting one of these devices in can make productivity go up. It can also protect them from legal liability.

Most medium to large businesses can also benefit by not having as many devices to manage and administrate, saving administrative and maintenance costs.

I think Fortinet is the market leader in this space. They have a great appliance that is easy to maintain, has nice reporting and they are dedicated to the product. Some of the firewalls of the major players are an afterthought and not their focus. You should read the white paper I wrote on the subject located here.