I attended the IT Security Entrepreneurs' Forum III http://publicprivatepartnerships.org/itsef/ at Stanford University yesterday where I was part of a panel discussing the current and future cybersecurity threat environment. Moderated by the always popular and entertaining Bob Bragdon of CSO Magazine, the forum was both insightful as well as informative.
The purpose of the Forum is to bring together government, innovators, entrepreneurs, system integrators, venture capitalists,academics, and scientists to discuss and address cybersecurity issues of national interest. Wow! I can tell you that innovation is alive and well in America. There were some very interesting start-ups and I kept thinking to myself, is this the next Symantec, Cisco, McAfee or Websense?
While there were presentations by a wide variety of notable security experts, as is often the case (in my personal opinion anyway), the best part of the gathering was the opportunity to chat in the hall with some of the small companies in attendance. I talked with a variety of people about everything from federated IdM on a massive scale to vulnerabilities on the nation's critical infrastructures and DLP solutions to automated risk and compliance apps. As the CISO for a large government organization, one of the very important things I do is try to stay up with new technologies, especially those that create efficiencies at the enterprise level. So, while government organizations are rarely on the bleeding edge of technology, I saw a few things and talked to some people that got me excited about how we might be doing things in the future.
While all of the sessions were unique and informative, the panel discussion on "Is There An Innovation Crisis in America" was very enlightening. When the Innovation Crisis panel was asked by moderator Pascal N. Levonsohn to identify the top two things government should do to increase innovation, the three panelists (Dr. Curtis R. Carlson, Dr. Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, and Lesa Mitchell) were almost unanimous is saying that the government should be providing more funding for research. Dr. Carlson also said that Sarbanes Oxley should be eliminated for small companies since it creates such a huge burden and Ms. Mitchell stated, somewhat humorously, that when we issue a PhD to a foreign student, the diploma should come with a green card to keep them working here in America.
John Thompson gave the closing keynote and got every one's attention when he said that Symantec is now seeing 15,000 new threats every day, or over 600 every hour and that "some attackers are as well financed as some of the start-ups here in Silicon Valley!" John will certainly be missed when he retires at the end of the month.
The bottom line is that I think it's critically important for government to actively stay in the loop with technology entrepreneurs in America and support their innovation wherever possible. What do YOU think?
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