Rational Survivability

At the RSA security conference last week I spent some time with Tom Gillis on a live uStream video titled “Securing the Network.”

Tom happens to be (as he points out during a rather funny interlude) my boss’ boss — he’s the VP and GM of Cisco‘s STBU (Security Technology Business Unit.)

It’s an interesting discussion (albeit with some self-serving Cisco tidbits) surrounding how collaboration, cloud, mobility, virtualization, video, the consumerizaton of IT and, um, jet packs are changing the network and how we secure it.

Direct link here.

Embedded below:

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I don’t pay much attention to lists or awards, other than to usually make fun of them (especially when I’m put on one.)

However, this time I’ll make an exception. I was nominated this year for the RSA Security Bloggers Awards in the category of “Most Entertaining blog” and was voted “most likely to do something stupid” (in other words, I won.)

I was up against some stiff competition from the likes of Mike Rothman, Jack Daniel, Erin Jacobs and Adam Shostack (et. al) All these folks are fantastic bloggers and I’m lucky enough to call them all my friends.  In between ejecting party crashers and making fun of Rich Mogull during my acceptance speech (the whole one sentence,) it was great to chill with people I only get to see in person at conferences.

Thanks very much to all who voted for me and thanks to the hard work by the judges and those who organized the bloggers meetup. Next year I hope they have a category for “best bouncer for the meetup.” 😉

I’d like to congratulate the winners in the other categories, also:

Best Technical Security Blog – The SANS Internet Storm Center Blog

Best Non-technical Security Blog – Krebs on Security by Brian Krebs

Best Podcast – Pauldotcom

Best Corporate Blog – Jeremiah Grossman, White Hat Security

Thanks again.

/Hoff

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David Sparks (c/o Tripwire) interviewed me on the state of Information Security in virtualized/cloud environments.  It’s another reminder about Information Centricity.

Direct Link here.

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Here are the slides from my Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) keynote from the Cloud Security Summit at the 2010 RSA Security Conference.

The punchline is as follows:

All this iteration and debate on the future of the “back-end” of Cloud Computing — the provider side of the equation — is ultimately less interesting than how the applications and content served up will be consumed.

Cloud Computing provides for the mass re-centralization of applications and data in mega-datacenters while simultaneously incredibly powerful mobile computing platforms provide for the mass re-distribution of (in many cases the same) applications and data.  We’re fixated on the security of the former but ignoring that of the latter — at our peril.

People worry about how Cloud Computing puts their applications and data in other people’s hands. The reality is that mobile computing — and the clouds that are here already and will form because of them — already put, quite literally, those applications and data in other people’s hands.

If we want to “secure” the things that matter most, we must focus BACK on information centricity and building survivable systems if we are to be successful in our approach.  I’ve written about the topics above many times, but this post from 2009 is quite apropos: The Quandary Of the Cloud: Centralized Compute But Distributed Data You can find other posts on Information Centricity here.

Slideshare direct link here (embedded below.)

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