Infosec 2008 - Day 1 PM

InfoSec, in my opinion, is better than RSA was. In complete contrast to last year, there is very little PCI talk, there's barely mention of DLP, and everyone seems to have their own product for doing their own thing. There are even fewer nurses uniforms here than last year (but still more than none). Sadly, nothing really jumps out at me and grabs me (not even a nurse).

Some things that have pleased me then:

1. Meeting up with Colin Tankard, my ex-boss at Vormetric, who is still selling Coreguard across Europe. I think their time is coming at last in the UK. Unstructured data encryption is hot here right now since the government lost so many records, repeatedly at the beginning of the year. It was all 'junior' employees at fault obviously.

2. Meeting Iain Kerr from Protegrity at lunch. Iain seems to have worked for every successful tech company in the world in the last 30 years. A Scotsman living in Florida, with a hybrid accent that sounds like, well, a chilled out Scotsman. He also ran his first marathon at the age of 50, and plays golf off a handicap of 7 (up from 1). He's been brought in to head up their technology drive into the UK, and is certainly more than capable.

3. I also had lunch with a journalist Iain Thompson from VNUNet, the Managing Editor, no less. Journalists are always a source of consensus of information, so it pleased me to hear that his impressions so far were similar to mine (see above). One thing I had not heard however was the stance which Microsoft has been taking where 'everyone should share and peace and love' were Iain's words (more or less) - aiming for shared standards that is, but then in a Microsoft world, of course that's what they want.

Fight the power!