What a great week we just had in St. Pete Beach, Florida at our annual Perspective Users’ Conference!
This year’s conference was our first sell out since Perspective was released, there were many first time attendees (including one literally from the other side of the world—Australia) and it included one of the best sessions I’ve ever seen, as a presenter or attendee. The session I’m referring to is a client panel discussion where we had Delta Air Lines, Raytheon, Monash University and Progress Energy talk about how they use Perspective and the data they get from the program.
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I have two phrases courtesy of our Keynote Speaker, Shayne Bates, CPP, of Microsoft Global Security that I have to share… ‘culture of no’ and ‘end user bypass’. Do you have any idea what he was referring to?
For ‘culture of no,’ Shayne was referring to the IT departments of most organizations where the easy answer—admittedly sometimes with very good reason—is ‘no’. In the past, you couldn’t get around it. Now, you can, and with an ‘end user bypass’, you circumvent the IT group by going straight to the Cloud. As amusing as this may be to anyone who’s ever had a tough time with IT, the best way, of course, is for IT and Corporate Security to work together. And, throughout his keynote, Shayne touched on the importance of a partnership with IT as he shared some general Cloud knowledge with the attendees while appealing to their security sensibilities by sharing the Cloud Strategy currently in place at Microsoft Global Security.
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It’s Day One of our Users’ Conference and Perspective clients from all over North America (and one from Australia!) have converged on the TradeWinds resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida for two days ALL about Incident Management. It’s a sold out crowd with some high expectations.
As I was speaking with various attendees who are back for their third, fourth and, in one case, eighth conference, they all expressed how much the Users’ Conference has impacted them in the past and how… given that… they need to return home this year with even more knowledge and ideas.
So, can you really keep learning, year after year, when you’re talking about the same software system with the same fundamental purpose?
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5 Things You Need to Have for Information Security in a SaaS Environment
Futurist, Alvin Toffler, wrote in his 1970 publication Future Shock, “Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.” Any change in what or how we use technology can present a number of issues, and Cloud Computing is not exempt to this.
First off, for those who do not know what the ‘Cloud’ is, here is a definition:
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).1
Cloud Computing and SaaS (Software as a Service) are terms often used together to describe the same thing. ‘Cloud’ typically refers to computing environments for running applications, managing, storing and analyzing data. The term ‘SaaS’, or ‘Software as a Service’, refers to a specific distribution and implementation model for applications running in the Cloud.
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At a recent Edmonton Training Session (ETS), I struck up a conversation with two of our attendees from the mining industry. Both were there trying to keep up with the “Changing World of Incident Management”.
They were explaining that their security department utilized nearly 20 separate information systems and I was amazed to hear that each of these systems played a key role in maintaining their security!
After I picked up my jaw from the ground, I realized that they may not be seeing what we see at PPM 2000 every day—the benefit of integration.
As we delved further into the conversation, I was sure that each of their information systems had relevant data in them. I was also sure that these information systems all had sharable information of great benefit to the security department. I was absolutely sure that this mining company could benefit from integrating the information in these systems somehow. The only thing they said was, “that would take 100 years to do”.
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