I’m sooooo excited about this year’s event. This is the 6th year our company, Carolina Advanced Digital, has hosted the event, along with our partners. What started as a small customer appreciation event has morphed into a full-fledged conference.

Last year we moved the event from a small local country club to the Grandover Resort & Conference Center in Greensboro, NC. My bosses (aka parents) were a bit skeptical at first, but the event turned out great, with over 80 attendees from NC and surrounding states. This year, we’re making another leap of faith by extending the event to 2 full days (yikes!).

At our Hot Topics Conference, we identify what we and our customers think are the current ‘hot” IT and security topics and we plan the event and presentations around that. This year, we have an amazing line up, including technical breakout sessions, a special keynote, directors reception, industry expert panels, half-day technical workshops and (of course) the Golf Tourney.

I’m especially excited about our panels- we have a NAC Industry Panel with Mauricio Sanchez (ProCurve), Lisa Lorenzin (Juniper), Patrick Wheeler (Symantec), moderated by fellow security blogger buddy Alan Shimel of StillSecure. Our other panel is participating in the Hot Topics Roundtable discussion, led by John McCumber with a panel comprised of industry experts, technical gurus and even legal expertise to weigh in on Web 2.0 issues. It’s going to be awesome!

Here’s an overview of our 2008 IT Hot Topics Conference:

Event Dates & Location
IT Hot Topics Conference 2008
Grandover Resort & Conference Center
Greensboro, NC

May 15th & 16th, 2008
Thursday 9:30am - 5:00pm*
Friday 8:30am - 4:00pm
Register Online: http://www.HotTopicsConference.com

What topics are on tap for 2008?

2008 Features
• 12 Breakout Sessions
• Half-day Technical Workshops
• Special CISSP Prep Sessions
• Directors Reception Thursday Night*
• Special Keynote
• NAC Industry Experts Panel
• Hot Topics Roundtable
• Earn CPE Credits at Hot Topics
• Hot Topics Golf Tourney (optional)
• Win a Nintendo Wii Gaming System!

2008 Topics

• Security Visualization
• Web 2.0 in Enterprise
• Application Acceleration
• Network Management & Logging
• Data Leakage Prevention & Encryption
• NAC (Network Access Control)
• Wireless Trends & 802.11n
• Email Security for 2008
• Virtualization

Our 2008 partners include: ProCurve Networking, Juniper, Symantec, Winmagic, Packeteer, SonicWALL, StillSecure, splunk>, NetApp, Littler and ISSA.

You can check out the event website at www.HotTopicsConference.com. Aside from the Golf Tourney, the event is FREE for qualified attendees.

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This is my first year at RSA, and I really had no clue just how large it was. The expo floor is massive, and it’s filled with near-Interop-sized booths and hooks. To kick the day off, I caught the morning keynotes in the main hall, then took some time finding our partners and other folks on the expo floor. I attended some peer to peer breakouts, but due to the nature of those sessions, I’m not going to publish any information from those. Aside from that, here’s how Day 1 went…

I visited WinMagic and chatted with Thi Nguyen-Huu (their CEO), Joseph Belsanti (Director of Marketing) and several other great folks there, including Diane and Maurice. Later in the day, I stopped back by to hear Rich Mogull’s 15-minute talk on disk encryption and FDE there at the WinMagic booth. They had a full audience for that one, and I believe there are two more both today and tomorrow if you’d like to see it. You may be seeing more info from me on WinMagic’s SecureDoc solution… stay tuned for that.

I found the Juniper crowd and ran into Lisa Lorenzin and fellow TNC’ers at the TCG (Trusted Computing Group) booth. I’m hoping to re-visit there today and see some of the interoperability demos. They had a pretty steady crowd there yesterday.

Of course I stopped by the ISC² booth and have a t-shirt to show for that. (Remind me, I have another tidbit to share with you later).

What else… Oh I’m hoping to stop back over to see the Splunk demo. I’ve heard they have a great logging solution, and we’re getting requests from several customers to recommend a log management product. Yesterday was a bit too chaotic and I due to the noise and traffic flow I wasn’t able to get in a position to actually hear anything. Splunk was the source of my second t-shirt. I have to give them kudos, it’s a ladies baby doll tee and reads “We take the SH out of IT”.

My favorite of the day had to be over in Alan’s neck of the woods at the StillSecure booth. Depending which side of the booth you approached from, you may or may not have enjoyed the humorous ‘Cisco Recycling Center’ theme happening on one side. There was an overhead sign (as seen here), complete with the actual recycling bin (here’s that one). I didn’t take many photos yesterday because I forgot to recharge the camera after all the garden photos- but- I had to at least get these pictures. (And, congrats to StillSecure on their SC Magazine Awards win last night!)

I stopped by the Microsoft booth to learn a little more about the new products and NAP. They gave me a cute little review of how 802.1X worked, explained the endpoint checking and reporting and then one of the guys told me the best place to get more information was on their website. Uh.. okay. LOL. So, sorry but there’s not much information to report back from that experience.

Tipping Point was an unexpected stop for me. Completely unrelated, there’s a project I’m involved with and the team leader from that project sent a text instructing me to go find another team member, who happened to be a global product manager at Tipping Point. I headed that way to find my ‘person’ and was pleasantly surprised by some of the solutions I saw while I was there.  

Throughout my meanderings on the expo floor, I was able to find several fellow Security Bloggers and Security Twits by strategic use of Twitter. :) Among those, I found Jack Daniel, Jennifer Leggio, Stacy Thayer, Dan O’Neill, Rich Mogull and Martin McKeay.

I was able to catch up with Mike Fratto after the sessions and talk him into a ginger ale before he headed off to do a little writing. If you don’t know who Mike is, he’s - well I guess several things - security editor for Information Week, lab director, lead NAC Analyst for Network Computing. I’m not sure of the ‘official’ titles, but he’s the media NAC go-to-guy. Definitely check out his NAC Immersion Center blog.

And today? Another day full of meet-n-greets, keynotes adn breakouts. Tonight? Tonight is the Security Bloggers Meetup!

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