Purpose
The purpose for Rants and Raves collection is:
- Provide the Bp.IP Initiative with insight into the state of the deployment of IP-based security technology - from a best and worst case perspective
- Discover what shortcomings in products and services create system vulnerabilities, unnecessary costs or needless extra work for IP-based technology deployments
- Identify companies that are providing outstanding products, services and supporting information that contribute to sound IP-based technology deployments
Our Focus
Our focus is on the convergence aspects of security technology such as wired and wireless networking, intelligent devices, computing capabilities, and integration with IT and business information infrastructure.
Problems with a camera lens, for example, don't belong here but in a forum specifically for security video cameras and equipment.
Problems and successes that do belong here are those relating to networking, electronic data, integration between devices and systems, and the cyber security of electronic physical security systems. This includes also the quality of information, documentation, training and education relating to those technology aspects.
Influencing Industry Progress
The rate of technology improvement in the security industry is too slow compared to other industries, and compared to the needs of security industry customers. This lag is significantly influenced by a number of factors:
- Dynamics relating to legacy technologies
including:
- profitable product lines (companies' existing investments)
- installed customer base (customers' existing investments)
- Accelerating rate of advancement in information technology (including in consumer products) resulting in:
- a trend to lower product costs
- a trend to increasing product capabilities
- technology information overflow for purchasers, specifiers and installers
- shorter technology training cycles for customer and service provider technicians
- difficulty predicting where technology is going
These factors tend to hinder security industry technology advancement and slow the rate of technology adoption.
We want to provide a counterbalancing dynamic: meaningful feedback from operators, purchasers, specifiers and installers of IP-based security technologies.
Rants
This website contains a significant amount of material relating to disclosing and fixing security vulnerabilities. However, there are also important aspects of products, systems and services that don't relate primarily to vulnerabilities. They impact how hard or easy it is to deploy the technolgoies. They also affect how costly or affordable it can be, inlcuding indirect costs such as staff time, employee waiting time, and so on..
We are interested in issues relating to the information technology aspects of the products and systems (computers, networks, and electronic data) on deployments, and shortcomings in products, marketing information and documentation.
As a lone individual, you can't easily tell whether a problem you are encountering is common or not. You can't easily tell if you are getting a "song and dance" story, or accurate feedback. You don't know the particular company's history of response.
When you get major deployment heartburn, we want to hear about it. You should leave out customer-specific information (such as your company name or facility name) but provide generic information instead (like "manufacturing plant" or "high-rise office building").
Rants can be private, which means we don't publish them but submit them (with or without your name) to the company in question. Rants can be public, which means we may summarize them for publication on this website in one way or another. If many similar Rants to yours have been received, we may simply up our internal count of such reports, since similar earlier Rants will have been published already.
Rant's don't replace submitting a trouble ticket to the product or service provider's support team. Their purpose is to help fix your problem. Our objective is to help fix the industry as a whole.
If you are ready now, Submit a Rant.
Raves
We want to hear when a company does something right, that relates to the information technology aspects (including documentation, training, and so on) of deploying their technology.
For example, Firetide includes information in their installer instructions on how to harden their network. If this information were highlighted front and center, or called out in a table of contents, we'd be raving about it.
Mercury Security Corp. makes access control panels that you can configure to only accept encrypted connections. If the 19 access control companies who utilize this panel put that information front and center in their documentation, we would rave about that.
If a security consultant provides you with a video deployment network plan that your IT department is delighted with, that's something to rave about.
If you are ready now, Submit a Rave.