Review of SOURCE Boston 2009

SOURCE Boston was an amazing experience for me.  A great deal of the thought leaders in our industry shared thoughtful insights and experiences.  I had the opportunity to really engage in a great many conversations with people like Raffy Marty, Ron Gula, Marcus Ranum, Peter Kuper, Amit Yoran,  Dov Yoran, and Jamie Fullerton the list could go on for days.  It renewed my energy to be around so many intelligent and security focused people.  Stacey Thayer and the entire SOURCE team should be very proud of this CON.  One presentation really stood out in my mind.  Hoff’s “The Frogs who desired a King” was easily one of the best presentations I’ve seen in years.  My quick summary of SOURCE and links to other reviews follow:

In my opinion to gain the full experience of SOURCE you had to both be in attendance and be active on Twitter to follow #sourceboston the /tweets/comments/interactions worked hand in hand to bring even more insight and fun to the CON.

Day 1:
Peter Kuper’s Keynote:  Peter’s message was accurate and very clear:  The overall market is terrible but there are real opportunities for both entrepreneurs and buyers.  In short vendors must find a way show value and to do that they better become partners with their customers.  Customers need to push vendor’s harder and extract value, don’t accept things at face value.  For more information about this talk Raffy Marty has a good writeup.

Adam Shostack’s Presentation - The live tweet was an interesting effort (Zach Lanier put it together to encourage conversation)  For a review of how it went see Adam’s blog - http://www.emergentchaos.com/archives/2009/03/tweet_tweet.html post.  Overall I enjoyed the session and as a result I will go out and read “The New School of Information Security”.

Security Start-Up Showcase:
We (Decurity) were thrilled to have the opportunity to tell our story in this session and the resulting comments/discussions I had with those in attendance was very exciting.  It seems Decurity is headed the right direction.  I agree with the assessment posted here that the Security Start-up Showcase could certainly be improved for both the audience and the participants, but I personally found great insights coming out of the session.  I just hope that Decurity was one of the interesting ones he noted in the blog post

Day 2:
Amit Yoran’s Keynote  (If anyone doesn’t know - Amit is the former Director NCSD / US-CERT Director and is now CEO of NetWitness).  So many have blogged on this topic already so I’ll just say it was fun especially towards the end when it became very interactive with the likes of Marcus Ranum and Dan Geer sparking offshoot conversations.

Chris Hoff’s “The Frogs who desired a King” Presentation   Ok let me make this simple:  This was the single best presentation I’ve seen in several years.  Not only was it well thought out, completely engaging and rich with content, Hoff removed the mist from the “Cloud” and described the core components of the “Cloud” and the security implications exceedingly well.  I’m not sure how the video will come out, I think it was one of those you had to be there to fully appreciate it moments, especially when Dan Geer came in and sat “Front and Center”.  For me it was a mixture of supreme competence, excellent communication, fun and the fact that Hoff presented a way forward that everyone looking into using the Cloud should consider that made this presentation stand out.  I can’t say enough good things about this presentation.  Hoff - it was simply awesome!

I could go on for days about how much value I saw in SOURCE Boston this year.  I missed so many great presentations because everyone of them was simply awesome.  The hardest part of the CON was deciding which of the amazing speakers you had to miss.  It was one of the better conferences I’ve been to in years, rejuvenating, entertaining, enlightening and fun!  I will be there next year.