Deciso launches the OPNsense firewall appliance-- a turnkey open source firewall alternative offering an easy-to-use yet powerful security platform powered by the AMD G-Series system-on-a-chip (SoC).

According to the company the G-Series SoC allows for a stable, cost effective and durable product, as well as gigabit network security. Meanwhile the embedded low-power design eliminates high cooling requirements, since the quad-core version has a typical power usage of only 20W.

Guest editorial by Steven Sinofsky, Board Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz where he serves on boards of investments, an Executive in Residence at Harvard Business School, and advisor to Box. His career began at Microsoft where he was President of the Windows division through 2012 working on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Surface as well as Windows Services such as Outlook.com and SkyDrive.

This past year has seen more wide-spread, massive-scale, and damaging computer system breaches than any time in history.

The Sony breach is just the latest—not the first or most creative or even the most destructive computer system breach. It matters because it is a defining moment and turning point to significant and disruptive changes to enterprise and business computing.

The dramatic nature of today’s breaches impacts the enterprise computing infrastructure at both the endpoint and server infrastructure points. This is a good news and bad news situation.

According to Gartner the Internet of Things (IoT) will drive the device and user relationship requirements of 20% of identity and access management (IAM) implementation by 2016, bringing new concepts in identity management.

"IAM, as defined today, will bifurcate, with identity management assuming a broader entity relationship management role and access management assuming a broader relationship execution role that replaces or supplements authentication policy and authorization enforcement," the analyst says. "Traditional authentication and authorization for user identities will continue to include devices and services, but will also incorporate expanded machine-to-machine (M2M) communications requirements into expanding digital business moments. Embedded software and systems will make extensive use of the new and expanded IAM architecture to handle the scale and ubiquity requirements the IoT will demand."

In other related predictions, Gartner says enterprise mobility management integration will be a "critical" IAM requirement for 40% of customers-- up from 5% today-- as organisations demand consistent, convenient and secure access to enterprise and 3rd party applications across a wide array of devices. As such, IAM and EMM will both become security requirements, protecting from threats that have overcome traditional IAM and EMM controls when used in isolation.

Trend Micro and HP sign a "strategic OEM agreement" in the name of enterprise security-- HP Tipping Point Advanced Threat Appliance (ATA) portfolio now leverages on Trend Micro's Deep Discovery technology.

Deep Discovery promises 360-degree visibility of cybercriminal activity, including targeted attacks, custom malware, C&C communications and other suspicious activities. It scans all network ports and over 80 network protocols (as well as web and email traffic), using custom sandbox images to detect threats.

The company says custom sandboxes are an "essential part" of effective breach detection solutions, enabling customers to prevent evasion by identifying and evaluating the threat of custom malware.

It detects threats across a range of endpoints and mobile devices, including Windows, OS X and Android.