Michael Farnum has a great post up today wondering if we in the security industry have been stifling our creativity by designing all of our management interfaces in one of two paradigms. The GUI kind of look and feel pioneered by Checkpoint or the command line standard that Cisco has made their own. It struck a chord with me because it was actually the second time I have heard the same comment this week alone. In speaking with one of the big analyst firms our own VP of product strategy, Andrew Grealy made the same comment.

This actually goes to the heart of what we are trying to do, especially with our Cobia product. We think there has got to be a better way. Why can't products just work, the way Apple does it for instance. So many things in the Mac interface are binary. You plug a mouse in, you don't get a message that the system has detected a new pointing device and goes through the install and you may have to pick a driver. You plug it in and the mouse works. If it doesn't work, something is wrong. Andrew has some great ideas on this around security. Instead of plugging in your IPs and stuff, wouldn't it be great to just tell your security product to protect your web servers? Is there a better way to let you manage a firewall? We think there is.

At StillSecure we have a history of creating easy to use GUI that are powerful yet intuitive. Andrew and his team are working on a rework of our Cobia GUI and some of our other products that we think are going to break out of the Checkpoint/Cisco mold for good once and for all. We hope the market will reward the innovation and the easier way to do business.