common denial

I covered for my fellow vSpecialist Jim Brigham (@i2speakgeek) at the Boise Idaho ISSA Meeting. The partner Cerium Networks asked RSA to speak at the event. I of course spoke about “Securing the Cloud”…  I mean really, what else am I going to talk about? The slides that I presented are below. Before the presentation, I spoke to some great attendees about the cloud and the struggles and how some people just don’t get it and never will. I wish I could give one on one attention to everyone, pushing the fact that this is the movement of IT and eventually you will need to make the changes. Of course there are exceptions, of course there are organizations that will never touch the cloud. I can’t think of what type of company this would be. I mean even my sister’s company backs up her systems to a cloud provider and she uses an email service. She is a one person company, she can’t afford to manage her IT systems. She works with numbers and not IT. Isn’t that one of the greatest advantages of the cloud? The fact that it services companies at all levels. Whether it is a company of one to a company of the largest size, the cloud provides something to them that they could never provide on their own or wouldn’t want to. I remember a sad time before the cloud, when companies were actually limited to local resources who knew only certain tools and you were stuck with them.
Anyway, the presentation and conversations went very well and I met some amazing people and got to talk about my favorite subjects. I did not get to catch many of the other discussions and the questions that came up. My specific presentation brought questions about the RSA Archer and VMware vShield technologies. The best statement that I got at the end of the discussion was… “thank you, you make it seem so easy”… I said that isn’t easy if it isn’t implemented correctly, planned correctly, and managed correctly but any time that I can take the fear out of security, I will accept that high compliment… thank you!!!