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Incapsula – Rest your worries

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Revised on: 2015-11-10

For much of the last three years my blog was dormant. Out of sight, out of mind. My mind, perhaps, but not the mind or rather minds of the people at Incapsula, which has protected it from malicious attacks while I have been to busy to check on how my blog was doing. I hardly ever logged in to my WordPress dashboard to update my plugins. I even hardly ever logged in to my Incapsula dashboard to read the list of latest atttacks. Why? Because I knew that is was perfectly safe, that’s how much I trust Incapsula.

Incapsula – four years on

When I signed up with Incapsula in 2011 it was in fact not so much for security reasons. Most of all, it was for speed and delivery, using Incapsula as a CDN, Content Delivery Network. The added security came as an extra bonus. It started in early 2011, first using Amazon’s Cloudfront, then switching to CloudFlare, before finally settling for and staying with Incapsula. You can read about my experiences here:

Amazon CloudFront as CDN
CloudFlare versus CloudFront
CloudFlare versus Incapsula
Incapsula website security

Now, four years on, it’s time for a revision of my posts. However, both Incapsula and CloudFlare have moved on since I first wrote about them, and this time around, this will not be a full comparison post, perhaps more like an appraisal post…of Incapsula, mostly.

Incapsula for security, CloudFlare for speed

Reading up on the latest Incapsula versus CloudFlare posts and news, for instance  Zero Science Lab’s in-depth firewall testing from 2013 or Anand Srinivasan’s closer look at differences in CDN in 2014, as well as Tracy Vides’ 2015 article on who might be leading the way confirms the impression I had of the two competitors back in 2011: It’s all about security (Incapsula) versus speed (CloudFlare). It’s clear that both companies pursue different strategies and different market segments. For an in-depth look at both CloudFlare and Incapsula, their strengths and weaknesses and differences, the aforementioned reviews are a good starting point.

Incapsula and I

I said that I wasn’t going to compare the two and I won’t. Especially since the plans they offer are very different, even in the free version. Cloudflare offers this and Incapsula offers that. For a full comparison the abovementioned blogposts are a much better option.Therefore, let me just focus on how I use the Incapsula Pro plan on my WordPress website here.

WP caching and minifying…no need?

Although I chose Incapulsa for security and not for speed I must say that I am very impressed with the caching and optimizing features. In fact, so impressed that I now can do without WP plugins for caching and minifying, without impairing my site’s performance at all. And less plugins mean less vulnerability. After one month without WP caching and minifying, and only using Incapsula’s features, there does not seem to be a difference in performance.

Looking at Incapsula’s own performance stats, there seems to be no significant increase in response time after turning off WP optimisation and leaving it all to Incapsula:

I’ve checked also my site using testing services like Pingdom, GTmetrix, Monitis, WebPageTest, and alikes, but I realise that the results are just too erratic, for many reasons. The test service’s results and thus visitor experience depends on too many variables: the visitor’s location in relation to Incapsula’s data centers, the visitor’s internet connection, the visitor’s computer or mobile hardware, the visitor’s browser and so on, to name just a few.

Looking at Google Analytics’ stats, since I run Google Analytics on my website, doesn’t help much, because the site speed sample size is only 1% of the total number of visitors.

Which leaves me with one thing: My own experience of how my website performs when looking at it from different locations using different platforms. Home, office, friends, this computer, that mobile, it didn’t matter, I simply could not see any significant deterioration in performance after settling for Incapsula as my sole provider of optimization tools.  So out go Zen cache and WP Minify.

Many of the Incapsula caching and optimization features are included even in the Free plan, it is mainly the dynamic content caching and dynamic content compression along with image compression and other advanced techniques that is added to the Pro plan. For most non-commercial website owners, the Free plan will suffice in terms of optimization options.

How-to guides

What I like about Incapsula are the support and product information pages. Here it is clearly explained (even to a computer illiterate like me) what turning on and off this and that security and performance option actually does, see for example  Content Caching, and Optimization Features. Since all settings are explained using screenshots of the dashboard it is easy and straightforward to relate this to my own website settings.

Incapsula Tutorial

If you need a tutorial that goes beyond what is offered at incapsula.com, Jeff Reifman has written an excellent piece just a month ago, explaining everything much better than I would be able to do. Enjoy! How to secure your website using Imperva Incapsula.

Security

Security is the part that really sets Incapsula apart from the rest, and which is why I chose the service in the first place. Obviously, a paid plan offers considerable more security than a free plan. However, one feature that does come with the free plan (and – correct me if I’m wrong – which CloudFlare does not have, not even in their paid plans) is Two Factor Authentication login for my website, ensuring that I and only I am able to log in for administering my blog and publishing any posts (or I can set a a given number of designated and verified admins). Considering how often I do log in this is probably going to be more of a hassle than a security feature, but good security is meant to be a hassle, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t be any security, or?

The other feature I cannot do without is the Web Application Firewall. Five years ago it used to come with the free plan, now it’s only in the paid plans. Do I really need it? Well, my site my not be the likeliest of potential targets for attack, but you never know, and judging from my thwarted attack stats the firewall has done its job well. During the last 90 days I’ve stood against 4 SQL Injection attempts, 8 Cross Site Scripting attempts and 108 Illegal Resource Requests. Perhaps not worth worrying too much, then again, there’s no telling what could have happened to my website in the three years I did nothing to it, had I not been protected by Incapsula.

Conclusion

After more than 4 years with Incapsula I have no reason to question the security layer surrounding my website. It works, it’s easy to use, and it can be set to do exactly what you want, provided you know what you want. That said, even to lesser sophisticated website owners like I am Incapsula is definitely worth the price.

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Broken links and broken promises

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

Maintaining a blog with more than 500 posts is a daunting task. While a post itself may still be OK, 8 years after it was written, the links in it most likely are not. When I revived my blog after three years of hibernation I knew this was going to be a a major problem. It was a problem I created myself in the first place. I don’t know where I got the (stupid) idea from that it would be a good idea to include links to the authors of the pares, books and reports I review on this blog. Well, essentially it is a good idea, because it allows me and my readers to link up with those who create or contribute to much of my content.

As time goes by

The only problem with this seemingly good idea of including links is that people change jobs, and organisations change websites, and it is totally up to me to find out. With more than 500 posts it’s hard to remember which posts that are most likely to have a change in external links. For one reason or the other I decided to link to people within academia at their academic institutions, be that professors, researcher or PhD students. Major pitfall. Reports and whitepapers that could be downloaded were linked to directly instead of downloading to my site and serving from there. Pitfall again. Blogs and websites are now closed or defunct or restructured in a way that my link no longer works. My fault for not reading these blogs/websites as often as I perhaps should.

Linkedin to the rescue

I quickly realised that this was going to be a mess when I started blogging again and started linking my newest posts with older posts that contained external links. There’s no point in referring to a source if the source cannot be found. Well, thank God for Linkedin. Most of the people mentioned on this blog are now on linkedin.com. Apparently they were not when I started to blog. Or researchgate.net. Or academia.edu. Or wherever else I could find them or what I linked to using Google. Some links turned out to be just dead with no traces of their content, even on Google, so I just deleted them, sorry about that. Hopefully they will not be missed. Lesson learned: link to a stable source.

One in twenty only?

So I started out to rectify this post by post, but soon began to think that there must be a better way. After all, I’m using WordPress, and surely, WordPress must have a plugin for that. Yes, it had a Broken Link Checker, and soon after installing it came up with 500 broken links out of 9000 (external and internal) links in total, that’s 5% or 1 in 20. Not too bad, and after a couple days hard work everything seemed in order. Well, “seemed” is the right word, because there are still a number non-functioning links. Sometimes a link to non-existing page will be redirected to, say, the university or company homepage, and not be registered by said plugin, because the links seems to work, technically speaking.

Bear with me, please

It will take a while before everything is in order on this blog, but I’m working on it every day. If you find a link that is not working, or not working as it should, please let me know. You can contact me directly using my contact form or you can leave a comment below the post.

Thank you for your understanding.

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A new beginning – a fresh start

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

15 years. More than 500 posts. Countless design changes. New friendships. Exciting opportunities. Insights. Knowledge. A 3-year break from blogging. And now, a new beginning, a fresh start with a new and according to Google, mobile-friendly theme. Perhaps that is the motivation I need to get started again? I don’t know for sure, but I hope so. There is a Norwegian saying, “Forandring fryder”, which best translates as “Making a change will make you happy”, and so far the change has indeed made me a bit happier.

Source of supply

In the 3 years that have passed since I changed jobs my blog has not seen many posts. Actually, hardly any posts. Not that there hasn’t been anything to blog about, there has been plenty, but there has been a major lack of inspiration. Why? Because a major source of supply in blogging material has dried up. No longer part of academia, my online access to academic journals is severely restricted at best and practically non-existent at most. Consequently, I haven’t been able to keep up with the latest research, and thus, most of my blog post ideas simply never turned up, since I was no longer able to tie up current research with current events and current trends. My blog suffered a supply chain disruption, as I wrote in Does a blog have a supply chain in 2010.

Back in business

Well, that well of knowledge has now started of flow again, having signed up as a part-time student. As I discovered when I scoured Science Direct for articles on transport(ation) vulnerability, transport(ation) resilience and alikes, quite a lot has been written on these subjects. That is the first source of future inspiration. What is surprising, though it shouldn’t be is that quite a few articles cite some of my work as their reference. I may have published and vanished,  but I have not published and perished. That’s good to know, and is the second source of inspiration for future articles. What remains to bee seen is whether I will actually have the time or make the time to write about these articles, or whether the infamous Writer’s Block will strike again. I hope not.

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Resurrection – back in business or not?

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Revised on: 2015-09-26

Perhaps it’s about time to get this blog up and running again? It has been 18 months since my last post, and while I have had many thoughts and ideas about what to write, I simply haven’t found the time or – more importantly – motivation to do so. Serious blogging does take some serious effort, which I have been lacking. While I cannot promise the same prolific posting that I used to have, I still want to post enough to let my readers know that this blog is still alive and kicking.

That said, getting back into blogging will not be an easy task.  First of all, given my last job change, which is what lead to the demise of my blog in the first place, supply chain risk is no longer the main focus. The academic perspective and literature and research review posts that I used to have are also no longer possible, at least not in-depth, as I no longer have complete access to academic journals. That is sad, but that’s the way it is.

Well, what from now on will be the main topic is transport vulnerability and crisis management as seen from my current workplace,  the Southern Region office of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, NPRA, (Statens vegvesen Region sør) in Arendal, Norway, where I work as a senior adviser in contingency planning and crisis management. Mostly, my work consists of supervising risk and vulnerability analyses, conducting crisis management drills and exercises, and developing tools and methods for this. My blog posts will report from this work, as a real-life example of how ISO 31000 Risk Mangament can be put to into practice.

One of the challenges I face, and perhaps the main reason why this blog has suffered, is that my work is conducted in Norwegian, so are the papers and reports I read and the presentations I produce – and to be put here they must be translated first, and not simply translated, but also adapted such that readers without inside knowledge of Norway and the NPRA will understand how things work here.

Nonethless, I have no intentions of letting this blog die, and I have already prepared some posts that will show up in the near future.

husdal.com is back?

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Revised on: 2012-08-04

Many of you may have wondered why there hasn’t been a new post on this blog for 6 months, and admittedly, I am quite embarrased about it, because I used to be such a regular blogger. Unfortunately my career change has led me down a path less in touch with supply chain risk, in particular the academic side of supply chain risk, and hence less to blog about. At least, that is how I have felt for the past six months.

Besides casting blogging aside for a while, I have been very busy with getting to know my new home area and I have also built a new house for my family (which I did blog about, albeit in Norwegian only). Add to that, my baby daughter has grown and no longer sleeps through the day or lies still on the floor, but demands full-time attention, round the clock, so my time for blogging is very limited. Good explanations, but bad excuses, I know.

That said, I hope to get back to blogging soon, because, despite what I first thought, my new job has ample opportunties/topics for blogging, although more related to business continuity and crisis managment, and less related to supply chain risk.

CloudFlare or CloudFront – who wins?

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Have you heard of CloudFlare? I hadn’t either until two weeks ago, but as a business blogger, CloudFlare should be among the first on the list of services to consider.  In a previous post comparing delivery speed in logistics with the page loading speed of a blog I described how I used Amazon CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network CDN to improve user experience by making my pages load faster.  CloudFlare, I dare say, works much better. In short, CloudFlare is a security gate, slash CDN, slash cache, three-in-one.  And, best of all,  it’s a free service.  But is it really that good? Over the last two weeks I put both CloudFlare and CloudFront to the test, and here is my experience with CloudFlare and what I found. You may also want to read my newest review: CloudFlare versus Incapsula

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Does a blog need a Mission Statement?

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Revised on: 2011-05-29

What is the purpose of this blog? Ever since I established husdal.com 13 years ago, and particularly since I started blogging 3.5 years ago, I have thought about where this blog should be heading. In the beginning it was a bit of a mixture of whatever came to me, then I focused almost entirely on literature reviews (academic journal articles, books and research papers), and recently it has gone back to a little bit of everything. Is my scope to wide or should I narrow it down? Surely, I cannot complain about a lack of readers, so perhaps it is fine the way it is? Nonetheless, finally, I have developed a “mission statement” and those of you following this blog on a regular basis will probably have noticed the subtle changes already. So…what is this blog going to be about in the future?

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Earthquake, tsunami, meltdown and data backup

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Japan is suffering. First an earthquake, then a tsunami, and now a possible nuclear meltdown. Perhaps I’m capitalizing on the current catchphrases of the day, but in a sense I too was in disaster management mode the last night, and if you are a regular reader of this blog, and if you happened to visit me between 1930 and 2130 GMT last night, you will know why. My blog was down. While this does happen from time to time and still is within the 99,99% uptime my web host promises me, this time was different. I had caused it myself, by messing around with settings better left untouched, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to solve it. Well, that was until I found the rescue button, after some harrowing hours in front of my computer: BlueHost Site Backup and Restore. These two hours were the best supply chain disruption and business continuity lesson I could have had, and this post is about what I learned. Mind you, if you’re unfamiliar with blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, this may not be the most interesting post for you, but I hope you will enjoy it anyway.

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How to use Amazon Cloudfront as CDN

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

Catchy title, you say? It is a bit off-topic perhaps, but not really, and it does sound logistics related somehow, and actually it is. In fact,  it is about the supply chain of my blog, and how to ensure a timely and reliable delivery of my blog contents to each and every reader throughout the entire Internet. And while it has very little to do with most of what I usually write about, the similarities to real-world logistics are strikingly familiar, and thus worth mentioning. Indeed, there are some supply chain lessons in practice to be had here. That said, this blog post is perhaps of more use to my fellow blogging community than to my fellow supply chain community, so if you’re looking for some supply chain gems, you may skip reading this post. If you’re looking for some blogging gems, please read on.

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2010 – a blogging year to remember

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

2010 is history and it is time to look back at my blog and how it has has developed over the last 12 months. As always, blogging is full of surprises, and it is impossible to tell beforehand which posts that will be popular and which not, which post that will be noticed by who and which that will be commented by my readers. This post takes a look at 2010 and provides some interesting insights on the traffic and popularity of my blog. Looking back, this post contains some reflections on the experiences I have made through my now three-year blogging adventure. Looking ahead, this post contains my ideas for the future and where this blog may be going in 2011.

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Blog Supply Chain Risk: Writer’s Block

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Revised on: 2015-10-25

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed a considerable gap in my postings, with several weeks and even more than a month between posts at times. It’s not that I have been too busy with my day job, not really. The only thing I could blame it own, perhaps, is the discovery of so many exciting but only virtually rewarding games on Facebook, but even that is not the full story. What happened is that I simply hit a brick wall, the infamous writer’s block. Considering what I wrote in my post on the supply chain of my blog, it sounds incredible that I should run out of topics to write about, but I did. So what helped me back?

A worthy reference

While perusing my website stats the other day I notices some interesting referrers: the SCRM Knowledge Base maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology had two of my posts listed: SCRM in six steps and one of my SCRM literature reviews. And it didn’t stop there. I even found myself listed as an “external link” on Wikipedia’s article on Supply Chain Risk Management, and I wish I could find out who put me there, but there’s not editor or user mentioned for that particular edit.

A favorite pick

I also found a very honorable mention of a post on disaster management on a site called continuitycompliance.org, stating that

One of our staff’s favorite writers on the subject of Supply Chain is Jan Husdal. And today our staff wishes to focus your attention on a topic raised by Mr. Husdal and dealing with the challenges of disaster supply chain management

Now, isn’t that nice?

I’ll be back

If those two examples not make me want to keep on blogging, I don’t know what will, and that is why you can expect more posts coming soon, and on a regular basis. With a faithful audience like this, blogging is fun…and rewarding. So stay tuned…

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Time for a change

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Revised on: 2011-05-29

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed some subtle  changes – or perhaps not so subtle changes – over the last couple of days, designed to make the site more easy to navigate. The site has literally outgrown itself, to the point that even I, who use it daily, have  a hard time finding my way around, let alone those who land on my pages for the first time. So, with the help of a weekend, and the principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) I have hopefully transformed this blog to the better, and I’m still working on it, as a blog is always a work in progress. It will never be really finished.

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Better Alexa ranking – how to

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today I will share some personal thoughts on my blogging: The magic Alexa ranking, supposedly showing a website’s popularity on the Internet, and perhaps an expression of how the supply chain of my blog works. But does Alexa ranking really matter? Is a high Alexa ranking really a quality sign? Some say it does and vehemently defend their point of view. I disagree and this post will tell you why…because Alexa is so easy to manipulate.

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A note to my readers

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Revised on: 2011-05-29

I’m sorry for not posting here as frequently as I perhaps should. I’m moving house and I’ve been renovating my new apartment every day after work for the past two weeks, leaving little time for much else besides work than a few hours of well-deserved and highly-needed sleep. It has been a learning experience, finding new DIY-skills I did not know I had, but also discovering the lack of same skills I thought I did have. It has also taught me about making sure I have the right tools for the job, and that improvising or using makeshift tools isn’t going to do the job right.

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Does a blog have a supply chain?

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Revised on: 2011-03-10

I admit this does sound funny, but is it possible to say that a blog has a supply chain? And if that is the case, are blogs exposed to supply chain risks? That is the question I’ve been asking myself over the last couple of days. Take this blog for instance. Traffic is slowing down these days, and I’m trying to understand why. Yes, I know it’s the Holiday Season, and all the students perusing my blog have handed in their term papers, and are no longer in need of my literature reviews, but still, that can not account for all the slowdown? What is happening to my blog?  This slightly humorous post takes a look at my blog from a supply chain perspective.

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2009 – traffic and such

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

I said in my earlier post, looking back at how husdal.com had developed in 2009, that I would take a closer look at my traffic stats and here it is. It is indeed interesting to look back at 2009 and see which posts that did well, which ones that did not so well, analyzing how people found their way to my blog, and what they read most. One post in particular stands out, but not for the reason I expected. And what are all these visitors from India doing on my blog?

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2009 – looking back

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Time for a short review of 2009, looking back at how this blog has evolved over the past 12 months and where it may be headed in the near future. Much has happened in 2009, much for the good, and hopefully, much good is in store for 2010 as well. This blog has seen quite a change during 2009 and by the looks of it, it is headed in the right direction (as far as I’m concerned), but will my readers follow?

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