Securosis Blog

We quite enjoy all the free evening booze at the RSA conference, but most days what we’d really like is just a nice, quiet breakfast. Seriously, what’s with throwing massive parties for people to network, then blasting the music so loud that all we can do is stand around and stare at the mostly-all-dude crowd?

Like any analyst, I spend a lot of time on vendor briefings and meeting with very early-stage startups. Sometimes it’s an established vendor pushing a new product or widget, and other times it’s a stealth idea I’m evaluating for one of our investor clients. Usually I can tell within a few minutes if the idea has a chance, assuming the person on the other side is capable of articulating what they actually do (an all too common problem).

I know what you are thinking. “Oh god, they should stick to podcasting.” You’re probably right about that – it’s no secret that Rich and I have faces made for radio. But since we hang around with Adrian, we figured maybe he’d be enough of a distraction to not focus on us. You didn’t think we keep Adrian around for his brains, do you?

As most of the industry gets ramped up for the festivities of the 2010 RSA Conference next week in San Francisco, your friends at Securosis have decided to make things a bit easier for you. We’re putting the final touches on our first Securosis Guide to the RSA Conference. As usual, we’ll preview the content on the blog and have the piece packaged in its entirety as a paper you can carry around at the conference. We’ll post the entire PDF tomorrow, and through the rest of this week we’ll be…

February 23rd (this Tuesday) at 12:00pm EST, I will be presenting “Understanding and Selecting a Database Activity Monitoring Solution” in a Webinar with Netezza. I’ll cover the basic value propositions of platforms, go over some of the key functional components to understand prior to an evaluation, and discuss some key deployment questions to address during a proof of concept.

I’d like some fail, with a little fail, and a side of fail.

Rothman was out in Phoenix this week for some internal meetings and to record some video segments that we will be putting out fairly soon. I have a slightly weird video recording and production setup, designed to make it super-fast and dirt easy for us to put segments together. I’ve tested most of it before, although I did add a new time saver right before Mike showed up.

In what remains a down economy, you may be suspicious when I tell you to think about leaving your job. But ultimately in order to survive, you always need to have Plan B or Plan C in place, just in case. Blind loyalty to an employer (or to employees) died a horrendous death many years ago.

I was in the car the other day with my oldest daughter. She’s 9 (going on 15, but that’s another story) and blurted out: “Dad, I don’t want to go to Georgia Tech.” Huh? Now she is the princess of non-sequiturs, but even this one was surprising to me. Not only does she have an educational plan (at 9), but she knows that GA Tech is not part of it.

To state the obvious (as I tend to do), we all have too much to protect. No one gets through their list every day, which means perhaps the most critical skill for any professional is the ability to prioritize. We’ve got to focus on the issues that present the most significant risk to the organization (whatever you mean by risk) and act accordingly. I have’t explicitly said it, but the key to network security fundamentals is figuring out how to prioritize. And to be clear, though I’m specifically…

The Securosis team is proud to announce the availability of our latest white paper: Understanding and Selecting a Database Assessment Solution.