First impressions of Gartner’s Security and Risk Management Summit

I mentioned last week that I’m attending Gartner’s Security and Risk Management Summit here in Washington, DC. I didn’t have any expectations about the conference since I’ve never attended this one before. Quest isn’t participating in the conference so for me it’s just an opportunity to attend some sessions and meet people. Based on the sessions that I have sat through so far, the vendor exhibits and who is attending this conference I will be back for sure. Here’s why:

1. There’s an interesting intersection between Security, Risk and Identity Management. This conference seems to capture that. I typically attend identity management conferences and while they are great conferences there usually are not very many sessions that cross over to risk, security or compliance. All of these topics are inter-related and none of them should be thought of in isolation of the others.
2. The Gartner speakers – including analysts from the Burton Group now – are really smart people. They talk to lots of customers. I like to learn from their experiences of talking to so many customers. It’s like getting 100 customers visits condensed into an hour long session. Invaluable for product managers like myself.
3. The session topics have been very interesting. I like the fact that the last slide of each session is a concrete action plan. What you should do immediately, in 90 days, etc. I’ll be blogging about some of the individual sessions over the next two weeks.
4. The attendees come from a wide cross-section of industry. Just because this conference is in Washington, DC I half-expected that the majority of attendees would be government folks. I was definitely wrong on that topic. Here’s a smattering of names of companies that I’ve seen walking around: Visa, Aetna, Bank of America, Canada Revenue Agency, Fidelity, Lockheed Martin, Nike, NY Life, TD Bank, Goodyear and Tyco. Of course there are lots of government (federal, state and local) along with education folks to. It’s a good mix of customers. There are probably 1,500 attendees at this show.
5. Sponsors of the show get dedicated time to showcase their solution. This dedicated time does not conflict with other sessions. This means that if you are interested in a particular sponsor’s solution you don’t have to toss a coin between it and a Gartner session. I’m sure the sponsors appreciate that.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll blog about sessions or topics that I found particularly insightful.

Example of a recommended action plan.

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