That's the question Xavier asks in his blog entry titled
Security: DIY or Plug’n'Play
To me the answer is simple, most of the appliances I ran into so far have no way of configuring them apart from the ugly webgui they ship with their device. That means that I can't integrate them with the configuration management framework I have in place for the rest of the infrastructure. There is no way to automatically modify e.g firewall rules together with the relocation of a service which does happen automatically, and there is always some kind of manual interaction required. Applicances tend to sit on a island, either stay un managed ( be honest when's the last time you upgraded the firmware of that terminal server ? ) , or take a lot of additional efort to manage manually. They require yet another set of tools than the set you are already using to manage your network.
They don't integrate with your backup strategy, and don't tell me they all come with perfect MIB's.
There's other arguments one could bring up against appliances, obviously people can spread fud about some organisation alledgedly paying people to put backdoors in certain operation systems.. so why would they not pay people to put backdoors in appliances , they don't even need to hide them in there .. but my main concern is manageability .. and only a web gui to manage the box to me just means that the vendor hates me and dooesn't want my business
A good Appliance (either security or other type) needs to provide me an API that I can use to configure it, in all other cases I prefer a DIY platform, as I can keep it in line with all my other tools, config mgmtn, deployment, upgrade strategies etc.
Mabye a last question for Xavier to finish my reply ... I`m wondering how Xavier thinks he kan achieve High-availability by using a Virtual environment for Virtual Appliances that are not cluster aware using the virtual environment. A fake comfortable feeling of higher availability , maybe.. but High Availability that I'd like to see.
