This week I’ve been in National Harbor, MD attending the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit. As a newcomer to this event, it’s been a whirlwind few days delivering excellent content and insights into key market trends and customer needs.

It’s refreshing to attend an event like this and sit in on sessions talking about the future of security and seeing how the analyst’s vision maps to our own. The good news, based on what I’ve seen and heard, we’re on the right track. I’m not going to get into specific details in this blog post, but in future I’ll post about some of things I’ve observed and put into a context that fits within our own go to market strategies and objectives.

The nice thing about this event is the fact that it’s focused. You’re talking to the folks that are making or implementing security polices for private and public sector organizations. Whether it’s listening to an analyst talk about the future of security or talking to a customer on the Solution Showcase floor, it’s clear, security is top of mind everywhere and the security and privacy of data has never been more important as it is today.

With 2,200 attendees at this event, there’s no shortage of opinions and perspectives on the best approach – whether it’s tool-based or process-based, full disk encryption, email encryption, malware defence etc. there’s always healthy, relevant discussions happening. The ability to talk to other vendors and customer prospects is invaluable and events like this really help us better understand what’s going on and how we can best help.

One thing is clear – cloud is fundamentally changing every organization’s approach to security, specifically around data security. You’re still hearing talk about BYOD, MDM and other buzzword acronyms, but cloud is by far still the key thing people are talking about. But I’ll talk about this more another time.