Mar06
RSA - Cloud Computing - Speaking to Crickets posted by Rick Howard
Filed in: RSA "Cloud Computing"
This week I have been attending the annual RSA Conference held in San
Francisco. I wish I could tell you that the conference was great or
that it was horrible. Alas, I cannot. RSA is famous for being a great
networking conference; a place to come to shore up sagging business
partnerships, renew ties to great relationships and to mine the
community for new ideas and opportunities. This week, VeriSign and
iDefense did that in spades. We rented out three hotel suites and
rotated customers, potential customers and the press through them on an
hourly basis. It was great. Being able to spend an hour with many of
our great customers in a compressed time window was exhausting, but
efficient and extremely productive. Everybody I talked to had great
ideas about the iDefense service; what it is today, where we could
improve it and where it might go in the future.
Because of those meetings, I have attended exactly two sessions of the
conference. From the folks I have talked to though, this year's
presentations were nothing revolutionary (this is not the place to come
for new technical breakthroughs), but most were good at explaining some
common themes that we are all dealing with. Looking through the
conference agenda, these topics pop up a lot:Cloud Computing
Cryptology
Social Networking
Health Care
Federal Compliance
The general consensus from the attendees is that if the phrase "Cloud Computing" is not in the presentation title, it will definitely get some attention during some portion of the lecture. The topic seems to be what everybody is talking about this week.
I am on the platform at 9:00 a.m. this morning giving the patented iDefense Trends Briefing. Among other things, I had 20 minutes of Cloud Computing content that I just yanked out of the slide deck because I am pretty sure that anybody that may show up for my talk will have been completely bludgeoned by the topic at this point. I replaced 20 minutes of slides with this "Reader's Digest" summary:
The CFO will make you buy Cloud Computing services because they are really, really cheap; get ready for it.
There are security risks, but they are manageable. I wouldn't put the company's crown jewels into the cloud yet, but the risk is manageable enough to put some low- and medium-end data and services there today.
We have a huge opportunity here; actually building security into these services from the get-go instead of bolting them onto the service after they become popular as we have done in every iteration of Internet technology in the past. Whether or not we do that is still an open question. The fact that everybody is talking about though is very promising.
Yes - I got the Friday morning slot to speak. Since a lot of conference attendees leave Friday morning because they don't' want to take the Red Eye back home on a Friday night and since many folks attending are doing the same thing we did here (talking to customers and not attending the presentations), I think I may be presenting to a bunch of crickets. Actually, that is not a big problem for me. Most people tell me that I like to hear myself talk anyway. This is right up my alley.
