I (we) had the same concerns. The question you have to ask is "What do I need control of?"In our operational environment we may require, for example, a quick change to a firewall configuration. Most , if not all, vendors will provide an SLA that pr...

First you need to define what services you require. They tend to fall into three categories. Testing (determine how deep the tests should penetrate), remediation (removing flaws in your security), and management (turning over your firewall, IDS, an...

The configuration you describe appears to have a nice top down design, however it has two single points of failure.The obvious one is the single "root" switch. The daisy chain design reduces the impact of switch failure, because you can quickly bypa...

During the last summer Olympics we used a VPN to send large audio files from Sydney to Washington. In our application latency ws nor really a concern, however it was fairly minimal. Bandwidth turned out to be a greater issue as we were misinformed ...