Despite all our advances in communications—from social networking, to blogs, to actual functional video meetings—the trade conference is still a necessity. Maybe not as much for the content, which makes the rounds pretty fast regardless of whether you attend the show or not, but for the serendipitous meetings and social networking (in the pre-Facebook sense).
I find something comforting in the rhythm and structure a handful of annual conferences bring to my life. The best ones stay rooted in one location, occurring at the same time, year after year. They are as much defined by time and place as topic.
If it’s February, it must be San Francisco and the RSA conference. I’ve attended for years, and despite the draw from the simultaneous Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, RSA is a show I won’t skip. But I do wish MWC would bump itself a week in either direction so I could do both.
As everyone knows, this year the press made much ado of a few high profile boycotts of the conference and the two alt-cons, Security B-sides and TrustyCon, that sprung up in response. But I think it’s important to separate RSA the company from RSA the conference. The latter remains the most important security event of the year.
Every year, one theme rises above the rest. I’m not referring to the “official” theme, but the trends that appear spontaneously in the valley. The theme this year should be security analytics. The venture community put this idea on an aggressive regime of funding injections. We should expect an entertaining gallery of result good and bad. But either way, we will learn something, and it would be a poor move to bet against this sector’s future.
I’m also expecting 2014 to bring some real SDN traction. Traditional security infrastructure is low hanging fruit vendors too often miss. RSA is where SDNs for security will finally get a long awaited debut.
MWC may be the premier event for mobile, but most mobile security companies cover both, and CA is no exception. At RSA we’re showcasing our new Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). This features SDKs for iOS, Android, and JavaScript that make enterprise authentication simple for mobile developers. As a bonus, this SDK offers cross app SSO. It means users sign on just once, from any authorized app. You should definitely come by the CA Technologies booth and have a look. And if you do see me at the show, be sure to ask me about the integrated PKI—surely one of the coolest, unsung features underneath the SDK hood.
CA and Layer 7 will host an afternoon event Monday Feb 24 at the nearby Marriott Marquis, and you are invited. You may recall we’ve held a few of these before, but this year, we have a very special guest. The event features Forrester Analyst Eve Maler, who will talk about Zero Trust and APIs. It is a great way to kick off the RSA 2014, and we’ll even give you a nice lunch. Who could refuse that?
To join us, sign up here.
K. Scott Morrison's Blog 