Data Auditing Blog

I have been tracking the RSA Show for a few years, and each time I return the question always is what is the show theme for the year. (This theme is usually the viral outcome of collective water-cooler conversations by the RSA show attendees – it is not the official mandate of the RSA program committee.) For example, last year’s theme ended up being about governance. The year before that was data & DLP.

2009 RSA show didn’t seem to have such a theme. This year the technology talk was more of the same – compliance, log management, DLP, encryption, …. (I am ignoring all talk about cloud security – while some vendors made an effort to call out cloud security, this is still too early to matter. )  Under the surface though, I noticed that the leaders and visionaries were busy retooling and hard at work with their products. The theme if any was to make technologies work in driving security and compliance into a large-scale enterprise. Driving initiatives into deployment. Driving them into scale. Driving them to manageability. While these drives are not sexy, they can lead to meaningful value for enterprises. They are sometimes the source of very interesting innovation. 

One example at home, was Tizor’s announcement of Mantra 7.0. This release extends the scale of data auditing significantly beyond what has been available in the market. For our press release – see http://www.tizor.com/News-And-Events/Press-Releases/4-07-09

Since this is my first post since Tizor's acquisition by Netezza (NYSE: NZ), I am also reminded of an interesting anecdote I heard recently from Ray Tacoma, the VP Sales at Netezza.  Ray's grandfather, a farmer, taught him the lesson that winters were the best time to sharpen tools. This RSA show was about showing off meaningful and sharpened tools in the winter of 2009.