RSA Conference: April 2008 Archives

Another RSA event is in the books.  It was a good week, and I always find it invaluable to have conversations with the IT mangers that are in the trenches

 

FaceTimeBooth_RSA.JPGWe also ran what I would describe as a completely unscientific survey, but thought the information would be worth sharing here. We surveyed more than 300 attendees who participated in our theater presentation on Web security, to get their thoughts on a few things. One thing that stood out was their concern over social networking. 95% of the respondents said they were "concerned" (45%) or "very concerned" (40%) about "Users accessing social networking sites from the corporate network."  Of course, this level of concern is to be expected at a security conference.   Only 8% said they had "no concerns."  

 

Is the high level of concern misplaced?  This information, along with the general comments of many of the IT people I spoke with suggests that the biggest threat for 2008 is clear: It's the employees themselves.

 

Vamosi-Boyd_FTBooth.JPGAlso at RSA, our chief malware researcher, Chris Boyd (aka Paperghost), held a well-attended session with CNET senior news editor Robert Vamosi covering the habits of a new generation of young hackers targeting social networking. In addition to Vamosi's coverage and Boyd's VitalSecurity blog, InfoWorld has a nice recap of the session.

 

It appears that social networking is everywhere these days, and especially on the enterprise network.  We've unveiled an update to our Unified Security Gateway today, which allows IT managers to control, monitor and report on which applications employees are using within Facebook -  over 20,000 applications today. We truly believe that social networking can be a productive business tool, and customers are asking for help as they work to understand it and how to apply it to their business.

 

As the WSJ's Business Technology blog commented, some people are still skeptical of how social networking helps businesses.  I know I use LinkedIn as my key address book for professional contacts, and know I would be less productive without it.  How are you using social networking to do your job?   We've heard from customers in energy, pharmaceuticals and financials among others that their employees are using it - in some cases it's the HR teams to run informal background checks on new hire candidates.

 

We'll be asking some of these same questions to IT professional at the RSA conference and plan to report back here what we've learned.  Speaking of RSA, it didn't get off to a great start for attendees en route from Heathrow.  Our own Chris Boyd, Director of Malware Research at FaceTime, blogs and shares photos here on a terrifying flight.  Glad to report he's arrived safely in San Francisco.

 

FaceForward Authors

Kailash Ambwani
President and CEO
Brian Babin
Director of Product Management
Christopher Boyd
Sr. Director of Malware Research
Frank Cabri
Vice President of Marketing and Product Management
Eric Young
Director of Field Engineering Services

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This page is a archive of entries in the RSA Conference category from April 2008.

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