Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit, London

#GartnerSEC on Twitter, for those that are interested.  F5 are present as one of the top tier sponsors at this conference, aimed at senior level IT security executives.  Around 450 people are expected to attend.  Major themes thus far – admittedly I write this at mid-morning on day one of two – seem to be fraud detection, managing mobile devices (again – a big topic last year also) and DDoS protection to a lesser extent.   

Associated with the event, F5 are offering a £100 Amazon voucher drawn from those that complete our very short DDoS survey. We’ll publish the findings via F5NetworksEMEA in short order. We’d very much appreciate your participation.

F5’s Dean Darwin took part in a main session panel discussion alongside EMC, in the shape of RSA, and Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson.  Gartner posed a number of questions about security topics – unseen in advance by the participants.  Mobile devices, cloud security and Big Data all turned up.  I’m not sure the results of the questions were really what Gartner wanted as panellists and audience were pretty much in agreement for the most part.  So the audience weren’t treated to a vendor bust-up, which must have been disappointing for some.

And what are F5 pushing at the show?  A very well-timed acquisition from the event’s perspective was F5’s Versafe buy.  Very, very topical going by initial conversations with a few large organisations that dropped by our stand.  The ability to inject web fraud detection into application sessions is a far better received message than more client-side software.