Fact, Fiction or FUD
The
book Lies My Teacher Told Me blasted away at legends our primary school
teachers had taught us. Those mistruths propagated by our teachers and
parents can easily be forgiven as the real story often involves
complications and concepts that we don't want tiny tots dealing with.
Should we forgive our vendors so easily?
I
bring this up because last week I went apoplectic when reading a paper
on database auditing written by a network-oriented security company.
The paper claimed that use of database audit regularly resulted in
overhead of 30-50%. What?! Monkeys banging on a keyboard could do
better, let alone a skilled Oracle DBA. Initially, I cut the vendor
some slack as I thought they had the decimal point in the wrong place –
3-5% is in-line with my experiences, and I know many DBA's who see the
same results. But, then the vendor built an entire cost of ownership
model on this false premise!?
OK, I get it, spreading FUD is a common practice. But, overly aggressive competitive practices aren't beneficial to anyone, least of all prospects. I'd like to think that vendors are better off focusing on helping prospect's solve problems and less on beating up the competition, but the amount of FUD we see in the security spaces says that isn't so. Do prospects notice that some companies are focus more on solving problems and less on waging negative competitive campaigns? Does that affect buying decisions? I hope so.
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