The end of April was a busy time for IT security analysts. April 24 to 26 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 Yell’s Phil Cracknell and Network Rail’s Peter Gibbons and plenty of searching questions from the audience, which numbered in the hundreds. The consensus was that the role of CISO is rising in importance but, with the 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 included 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. 

As well as walking the show floor, Quocirca had scheduled meetings with a number vendors including:

• 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 a $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.

The organisers say it was the “Best Ever” InfoSec and that the success “reaffirms it is Europe’s No 1 Information Security Event”. Quocirca hopes all the vendors see a return on their investment to participate.

However, the greatest value for Quocirca comes from meeting the security practitioners and hearing their stories of applied info security; thanks to all who gave their time in the sessions chaired by Quocirca.

A report on the IT Security Analysts Conference and CISO Forum will follow.