Sad to see Cyberarms fail
Today, I had a look at the Cyberarms website since I of course like to see what’s going on out there. I liked some of their ideas and I did see potential in there.
To my surprise they have decided to quit developing Cyberams and also to completely halt their operations apart from licensing renewals.
Their deficit is 250 000 euro so that saddens me of course when any business venture fails.
It’s never just a job for people in my line of work and as a business owner I do know what the owners and CEO and everyone is going through. It’s absolutely horrible with sleepless nights, feeling of failure and everything.
To develop a product and a software, especially for a new kind of thinking in terms of security, and actually getting system administrators, CEOs, CTOs and so on to realize actually that it needs to be in place isn’t easy and it’s very important to keep track of costs and also to know that development is moving forward as expected.
It’s not always a good thing to be some of the first in their field. Especially to try to make it commercially. Having the right people , business plan and everything is crucial.
Still, the need for a good and stable brute force prevention software for Windows Servers is still just as valid and important as ever. If not even more, considering all the private and public cloud solutions that are emerging. For instance, remember, Syspeace was born out of necessity from the Cloud Service rCloud Office at Red Cloud IT in Sweden.
Cyberarms will release their source code to customers with more than 250 licenses so there is always the possibility that it will be developed further but most likely only for the use at those customers inhouse and for their own needs.
To uphold a software and keep developing it when written by someone else can be very time consuming indeed and as a developer you also need to get new ideas from the guys who had the original idea.
Even though the person with the idea isn’t the same one who actually writes the code, that person is still often the one with the vision and ideas for the next level and what it should actually be.
For obvious reasons I am prone to using Syspeace but it still made me sad to see Cyberarms fail.
In the case of Cyberarms, one of the unfortunate miscalculations was that there was a free version that blocked x amount of attacks per day. The rest weren’t blocked.
For some system administrators, that was enough (I don’t really see why that would be enough . I mean , let’s block these three attacks but let these other 50 keep going but .. anyway …. ) so Cyberarms basically gave away a semi-full protection thus not getting the licenses sold needed to be able to further develop the product and to keep marketing and staff and etc.
This was also discussed in the Syspeace team as a possible way to reach out to new customers but we decided to make it a fully functional trial instead since we did see the risk in what happened to Cyberarms would happen to Syspeace too i.e. people only using the free version and being content with the semi-full functionality.
So, as sad I am to see them go, hopefully this might at least have more users and sysadmins to have a look at Syspeace for Windows Server protection. Regardless if it’s RDP, Citrix, SQL, Exchaneg OWA and more. If it’s reachable, people will try to brute force it.
The problem is there and now there’s one less security software to choose from to protect from it.
