A report from the NG Security Summit Europe - Lisbon, June 2011

From 14-16 June, Quocirca attended the inaugural European NG (Next Generation) Security Summit in Lisbon, organised by GDS International (a company whose Events division exists primarily to organise such things).

Being the first such event, the main concern for Quocirca and many other attendees was, would it achieve the critical mass of attendees required to make it all worthwhile? In Quocirca's view it did.

The attendees that make an event like this worthwhile are the real world practitioners, which when it comes to IT security are CISOs (chief information security officers). The event attracted about 50 such individuals (or at least their underlings) from well-known banks, manufacturers, retailers, charities and other large users of IT.

For the CISOs (and guest analysts) it is a freebie and a chance to network with and learn how their peers are addressing the ever growing list of security issues posed by the use of IT.

However, someone has to pay for such events. Here GDS had done a good job of attracting some high-profile sponsors from the IT industry. These included Symantec, BlackBerry, Verizon and Intel.

These vendors were also taking a risk; would they achieve their goals, which were being associated with a worthwhile event and access to the CISOs? The presence of so many senior IT security professionals was the key to achieving the first and GDS ensured the second, by keeping the CISOs to their committed meetings with vendors.

The issues covered in the workshops and panel sessions that comprised the main body of the conference ranged across the whole gamut of IT security. Quocirca ran two of these.

The first was on end-point security, where there was general recognition of the growing tide of consumer devices entering the workplace and the security challenge this introduced (presentation available here).

The second was data leak prevention (DLP). About 25 per cent of the CISOs in the workshop had deployed specific DLP technology and all agreed it had a value, which corroborated the findings of Quocirca's 2010 DLP report, "You sent what?", published in 2010 and freely available here.

Other workshops that aroused interest were on brand protection (an increasing concern), next-generation identity management (owning your own identity) and cyber "warfare" (only call it war if it really is war).

Quocirca came away from the event with new ideas and insights into IT security and is glad to hear GDS already plans a second event in Dec 2011, details of which can be found here.

Bob Tarzey, analyst and director, Quocirca