The VAR Guy

The RSA Security Conference started up in San Francisco on March 1, gathering the best and brightest in the computer security field. It seems like everybody in attendance had their head in the cloud. Here’s a day 1 conference roundup.

Key moves included:

• Novell and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) are launching a Trusted Cloud Initiative (TCI), which will “help cloud providers develop industry-recommended, secure and interoperable identity, access and compliance management configurations, and practices.” It could help standardize cloud computing – or it could wind up being yet another meaningless technology certification.
• Web risk analysis and compliance firm Qualys unveiled GO SECURE, a service designed to scan any website for malware and vulnerabilities.
• The IEEE and CSA released the results of an IT professional survey on the cloud. Some highlights? Use of the cloud and SaaS will rise over the next 12 months, the public cloud will start losing market share to hybrid and private solutions, and 82 percent of respondents say there’s an urgent need for cloud computing security standards.
• Several vendors, like SafeNet and FoxT, announced products aimed at improving cloud security.

This was only day 1: The VAR Guy is fully expecting the news and announcements to fly even faster tomorrow. But one thing is already clear. You can’t avoid the cloud – but it has a long way to go before people trust it implicitly with sensitive data. Watch this space for more.

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