DIDW Opener

Phil Becker and Rob Clyde (click to enlarge)

Our IOS event ended at 3pm. We had 5 sessions—too short, really, to get into the spirit of the event, but there were about 80 people there and lots of good discussion. We’ll be doing a 3 day IIW in December. You can register now.

Phil Becker started DIDW with an interview of Symantec CTO Rob Clyde. I’ve been critical of DIDW keynotes before, so I have to give them credit on this one. Phil did a great job of guiding the interview and keeping it from being a marketing speech.

One of the things they talked about was a possible future world where employees pick and configure their own machine, but in a way that still allows the enterprise manage security by policy. Universities could be a testbed for developing this kind of capability because they live in a world where they’re forced to let users pick their own machine and OS.

There’s still a lot of IT hegemony where IT professionals crack down on users to force them to do things a certain way. There’s a growing mindset however that wants to change this. Why can’t more applications be secure applications on the ‘Net?

Rather than trying to force systems to look all alike, users could be granted access to applications and networks based on the security profile of their machine. Rather than drawing a perimeter around the users, draw the perimeter around the data center and put the users all outside.

Another topic was the problem of establishing identity. We have lots of ideas for exchanging identity information, but the tough problem is trusting that the identity provider is who they say they are (and as we discussed earlier today in the reputation session at the IOS, whether you can trust service providers with your data). Enterprises have at least one point where an employee shows up and can show some ID to prove who they are.

In the B2C environment, you don’t have that luxury. 54% of individuals have decreased the amount of information they’re willing to share online in the past year. Consumers are more concerned with identity theft than with trusting that the online retailer will actually ship the item.

As I said, Phil did a great job conducting this interview. It was informative and thought provoking.

Posted by windley on September 11, 2006 4:56 PM