Las Vegas hosted one of EMC’s premier events, EMC World. While this show is primarily IT focused, RSA (the Security Division of EMC) makes a presence every year. This year was my second to attend, and even though the location was the same, there was a big difference in this year’s average IT attendee—they showed a tremendous interest in Security! In fact, our booth at EMC World was PACKED on Monday evening. We nearly hit our goal of visitors for the whole show on the first day!

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4058451581

Security and compliance had a track in the breakout sessions, and if you went to Sanjay’s keynote, you may remember our CISO getting up on stage to talk about some of the security challenges we face at the larger EMC global enterprise. But most importantly, I met with attendees and analysts that started to see how security isn’t the “no” department, but how it is an enabler for conducting business securely over today’s and tomorrow’s IT systems.

One post that you should check out is a concept that Pat Gelsinger (EMC’s COO) talked about in his keynote, the concept that data has gravity. Chuck Hollis explains more in this blog post equating large stores of data to gravity wells. Many companies are struggling with this in multiple ways, including on the application front, but the size and growth of data is quickly outpacing our ability to move it around. So data continues to get sucked into massive repositories without the ability to escape.

Now, because we cannot move the data around, we are forced to bring analytics and applications to the data. That certainly brings along some interesting information security challenges and solutions, especially when you rope in compliance and regulations. It also supports the notion that we’ve been preaching in that information security concepts and controls should be data centric, not infrastructure centric. Go check out that post for some interesting thoughts on the challenges in IT we face in the coming years!

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

Possibly Related Posts: