Sunday, October 16, 2011

Forrester security forum

It is gearing up to be time for the Forrester security forum but as per usual I can't attend as one of the disadvantages when you have a wife who chairs an event is that you kind of have to stay at home and take care of the kids. If I would be able to go I would be interested in the following talks:

I am interested in what Chenxi Wang's talk about "Securing The Extended Enterprise — Protect Your Information Anywhere, Anytime, And On Any Device" is actually going to contain. It is always good when you get intrigued by the talk abstract. Is she going to talk about BYOD for mobile devices? Or is she setting the stage for Andras Csar and Eve Maler?


Andras will probably continue the very strong (in my opinion) line of reasoning around access governance that he laid the groundwork for in the Forrester Role and Access Management Wave but focusing on social networks. Authorization in social networks is not an easy task and if you add that the user identity may actually reside in another social network and you might just have a federated user object to authorize on the problem becomes even more complex.


My guess is that Eve's talk on "Securing And Identity-Enabling Monster Mashups" will focus on OAuth and I think that is a story that really deserves continued spot light. I recently watched a webinar where Eve was one of the speakers and OAuth clearly can be used in very interesting ways to lift the security of the internal as well as external ESB to not only support authorization on the service account level but to take the authorization to the internal user or even end user level.


There are also some very promising keynotes. Scott Gerlach's piece on how to involve your customers looks really interesting. I and most info sec professionals normally have problems with even involving the business in IT security so getting the customers engaged is clearly a new and interesting perspective. The Diginotar affair has not really gotten very much attention outside of nerd circles so I am very happy that it is being talked about more. The CIO-CISO Partnership: Partnering To Protect Our Customers is another good keynote topic with really promising abstract.


Full disclosure note: The section at the start of this posting was not a joke. I am married to Laura Koetzle who chairs the event.