CSA Summit Adds Cloud Security Focus to RSA 2011
Posted by Stuart Lisk on February 15, 2011
As the annual IT security show, RSA Conference, kicked off Monday in San Francisco, the Cloud Security Alliance Summit was in full swing as well. The CSA chose to tie its annual summit to RSA, and it appeared a good choice, since it was standing room only in the conference room, with over 700 attendees there to learn the latest about cloud computing and security.
Jim Reavis, the Executive Director of CSA, welcomed everyone and introduced a good line-up of speakers, including top execs from leading SaaS and cloud companies, such as Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff. As the keynote speaker, Mark did a good job warming up the audience and talking big picture ideas, such as showing the computer cycles over the past ten years and how 10 times more users were added during each cycle. He also mentioned that social networking users have surpassed email users for the first time ever.
Salesforce had quite the showing, as the company’s Chief Trust Officer, Jim Cavalieri, spoke about data privacy, and Kraig Swensrud, VP of Product Marketing, closed out the Salesforce.com session by doing a live demo of their website, emphasizing on the security features around monitoring, data protection and access controls. He urged the audience to not only ensure secure data, but also the ability to monitor it throughout the process.
Another highlight was a talk by Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the White House, who I believe gave the most fascinating presentation of the day. He presented the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, outlining four key areas of cloud adoption: Security, Standards, Procurement and Governance. The Federal Government also categorizes cloud computing into collaboration, workflow, infrastructure, business intelligence, and information security.
Vivek used this forum to launch his “Cloud First” initiative, which requires every agency to evaluate viable cloud solutions before looking at traditional, on-premise software products. One of the goals by implementing this mandate is aggressively decreasing the current costs of managing 2,094 data centers.
The most humorous presentation, titled: “Commode Computing: Relevant Advances in Toiletry – From Squat Pots to Cloud Bots – Waste Management through Security Automation”, was by Christopher Hoff, Director, Cloud & Virtualization Solutions at Cisco. As the title implies, Hoff analogized security automation to the evolution of the toilet. Well done, and a good laugh!
This year’s summit also served as a great venue to provide the cloud security hungry audience with information about CSA’s roadmap and updates on the research committees. The panel discussions were a little long and unfortunately did not keep the interest of the entire audience. I, however, found the Q & A sessions interesting. My suggestion would be to cut the panels down from the three to perhaps one or two. The presentations by industry leaders addressing topical issues is definitely the way to go.
I would not be surprised to see the CSA Summit continue its growth trend and approach or even pass the 1,000 attendee mark next year.
Tags: Christopher Hoff, Cloud Computing, Cloud Security, Cloud Security Alliance, RSA Conference, Salesforce.com, Vivek Kundra
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