This year our biggest product category was access control. This seems right because as the enterprise morphs into a ubiquitous environment - with few if any borders - there needs to be a way to control who can access it and who cannot. With such challenges as cloud computing and SaaS, that is a bigger job than it may appear on the surface. In fact, it is a bigger job than last year.

This category is my personal favorite because it touches on the types of tools we use in the lab. These tools cover a lot of territory - from vulnerability analysis to forensic tools. Even within a category, such as forensic tools, we see some splits that we have needed to extract as product types in themselves. For example, many, including me, view SIEM as a network forensic tool and, as such, we might put it in the forensics subcategory. Not so here, though. Here we give it its own subcategory.

One might view this traditional category as slowly fading from view as the perimeter becomes fuzzier and fuzzier. In fact, there are an ample number of pundits who opine exactly that. But if we ask our innovators about the loss of the perimeter, they will tell you that there are always new perimeters. It's not that the perimeter is disappearing, they say. It's that its nature is changing.

So far, we have been concerned with tools that manage security and move information around. This category addresses the data itself. Data is, after all, the reason we implement security in the first place. Protecting the infrastructure and protecting the data both are necessary to ensure that our valuable information is not compromised.

Our last category this year is the one that ties everything together: security infrastructure. Here we are talking about those things that support all of the other bits and pieces of security architecture. Just like network infrastructure, security is, essentially, the platform on which everything else rests.