The end of April was a busy time for IT security analysts. April 24th to 26th was Infosecurity Europe (InfoSec) at Earl’s Court, the biggest such trade show in Europe and the following week was the Eskenzi PR annual IT Security Analysts Conference and CISO Forum (a gathering of chief information security officers, vendors and analysts), earlier than usual this year to avoid the Olympics.
Quocirca chaired two events on the opening day of InfoSec. The first was titled “The Rising Role of The CISO” with interesting contributions from the Yell’s Phil Cracknell and Network Rail’s Peter Gibbons and plenty of searching questions from audience, which numbered in the hundreds. The consensus was that the role of CISO is rising in importance but, with exception of technology companies, not currently to a board level role or a board level report. Quocirca gave an interview to InfoSec TV straight after the session which can be viewed here.
The second session in the Technical Theatre entitled “Modern-day NAC: a tale of two users Experiences from testing to deployment” was sponsored by ForeScout. NAC is short for “network access control”. The session started with a brief presentation from Quocirca which can be viewed here. However, the substance came from front line contributions from Steve Orman of the Sussex NHS and Tony Whelton of Wellington College, who both recounted how NAC (in their case ForeScout’s CounterACT product) was helping them to cope with the increasing use of personal devices on private networks, a particular issue in their respective sectors, health and education.
- Industry stalwart Symantec, full of excitement about its O3 web single sign on (SSO) initiative (watch this space for more)
- Blue Coat, which has recently reverted to private ownership in $1bn+ deal and is now re-emphasising its network acceleration as well as its security credentials
- Trustwave which recounted how its recent acquisition of M86 had rounded out its product portfolio with content security technology
- Barracuda, another vendor that has acquired its way from being a point provider of email security appliances to a broader portfolio including web security, network firewalls, web application firewalls (WAF) and backup/archive
- Cyber Ark, a leader in the privilege user management (PUM) space, which has just attracted around $40M new funding from Goldman Sachs
- Lieberman Software, another player in PUM that is aiming to increase awareness in Europe
- Valid EDGE which has a technology for ensuring there are no memory or process leaks between virtual machines running on the same hypervisor that it is now positioning for safe parallel malware analysis.