Between 2000 and 2003 I was part of a small group that was responsible for the security of the network in a remote military base. The work we did there was foundational for the rest of my career, at least so far. Once a week our team shut down for the afternoon to do training, and in the training one of us was responsible for researching a topic in depth and then presenting it to the rest of the team. We built web servers, firewalls, and proxies with OpenBSD, managed our intrusion detection system that we designed and installed ourselves, we even built a honeypot to watch malicious traffic. We spent a lot of long nights, and did a lot of hard work, but it paid off.

GigaOm is running an article written by Ralph Dangelmaier, the CEO of BlueSnap, claiming “We’ve reached the end of ‘build it yourself’ software.” It’s a nice thought, along the same lines as “We’ve reached the end of ‘host it yourself hardware’,” and “We’ve reached the end of you needing anything other than what someone else has already developed.” In the past fourteen years I’ve been in the industry though, the systems I’ve seen run the best are the ones hosted on our own hardware running our own code. Off-the-shelf software can be great for certain situations, but if you are outsourcing a core function of your business, what kind of value are you really providing?