Last thoughts from RSA Conference

The RSA Conference is now over. I’ve been coming to a lot of these and I have to say that this is one of the better ones. I saw a lot of innovation, new ideas, and general buzz at the show. It felt great to see security starting to get out of its doldrums.

I loved seeing Art Coviello on stage again. I liked Art a lot when he was at RSA and he has played a major role in building a $700M business. It is a personal note, but it was pretty cool this afternoon seeing a Security Dynamics alum (via CrossComm) sitting with a President!

I also liked the fact that security is starting to catch on to the concept of providing information to IT and network operations teams. Security sees everything so why not communicate some of what it sees to the rest of the IT organization? The next-gen firewall conversations, usually centered on Palo Alto Networks is a perfect example of this. Another is a whitepaper that Qualys was featuring that emphasizes the strategic business efficiencies to be gained from secure cloud services.

SonicWALL also surprised me with a big honkin’ box that is loaded with application level logic. That company has come a long ways from the one that averaged 1.6 boxes per small business when I first met them.

Time to run for the airport. It was a good week – catching up with lots of friends, having great security conversations, and contributing to the Trusted Computing Group and Anti-malware sessions!