John Pescatore

This week I’ll be sucked into the Gartner IT Symposium vortex, where life is pretty much a constant rotation of 1-1 meetings with attendees, giving presentations, doing the normal inquiry phone calls with Gartner clients, and sneaking time online to work off the never-ending flow of email.

Looking through my calendar at the one-on-one attendee meetings scheduled, the topics run the gamut. However, a few trends stand out:

1. Mobility – secure telework, secure use of smartphones and WLAN security questions.
2. Outsourcing – the terms are different (“use of the cloud” replaced “consume X as a service” which replaced “use an external hoster” which replaces “outsourcing”) but the questions are still about how the business can maintain security while outsourcing some function to external parties.
3. Threat update – what are the new threats we should worry about?

The questions I don’t see are to me the most interesting. Things like “How do I keep our corporate websites secure?” and “how do we make sure we aren’t already compromised by bot clients?” are missing. Essentially, there is a lack of attention to the current state of security.

Corporate web sites and desktops that are already compromised is a significant problem today, but the here and now is always boring – especially to the higher level attendees of Gartner’s IT Symposium. But the block and tackling of reducing current exposures is really where most of the gains will be made to make sure that mobility can be supported, that social networks can be used, etc.

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