Mar 14, 2019
Is the RSA Conference a must attend for security professionals?
Or is it enough to "just be in San Francisco that week"?
Check out this post and discussion for the basis of our
conversation on this week's episode co-hosted by me, David
Spark (@dspark), the
creator of CISO
Series and Allan
Alford (@AllanAlfordinTX), CISO
at Mitel. Our guest for
this episode is Tyson Martin, CISO
for Lumber
Liquidators.
David Spark, producer of CISO Series, Tyson Martin, CISO, Lumber
Liquidators, and Allan Alford, CISO, Mitel.
Thanks to this week's sponsor, Praetorian.
As a professional services company,
Praetorian helps enterprise customers solve complex
cybersecurity problems. We are the security experts.
On this episode of Defense in Depth, you'll
learn:
- Is RSAC for education or connecting? Does the value happen in
the conference center or outside? This was the initial part of our
debate and one argument is you need to graduate from RSAC to make
it more of a "connecting outside of the event" type of event.
- The show floor is overwhelming. As David Gorton of OverwatchID
noted, "The circus hides the serious of what we're trying to
do."
- There were a lot of comments about people not having fear of
missing out (FOMO), but you can't argue that RSAC has a
gravitational force that brings tons of security-minded people to
San Francisco for one week every year. There is enormous value in
that.
- The marketing model for vendors during and after the show is
starting to grate on practitioners. They're not enjoying the
endless cold calls the following week.
- The expo hall is focused on leads and given that so many of
these products are high ticket items, if just a few sales comes
through, then the event pays for itself.
- It's impossible for small booths to compete for visibility with
huge booths at the conference.