3 Big-Picture Themes CISOs Should Track At Interop

Preparations are well underway for staging one of the biggest Interop conferences yet. And while organizers have a ton of powerful security tracks on tap for next month's conference in Las Vegas, security leadership attending the show would do well to remember that infosec is only one facet of Interop. Whether in session tracks, keynotes or simply hallway scuttlebutt, the following overarching themes are lining up to be top-of-mind for many attendees. CISOs prepping their show schedules could find the information they pick up in these areas to be mighty useful in ensuring risk management keeps pace with up-and-coming IT and business trends.  

SDN

Software-defined networking (SDN) has started to cross the threshold from the theoretical to the practical as more enterprises start to legitimately explore the possibilities that policy-driven automation can offer for IT scalability. In fact, according to analysts with Infonetics, more than 80 percent of medium and large businesses plan to implement SDN by 2017, with 60 percent already underway or very soon starting up pilots or trials. CISOs can gain some advantages through SDN infrastructure, but security experts recommend they start brushing up on how it works and get in on the ground floor, lest security become another too little, too late add-on within the architecture.

Hot Session: SDN Building Blocks

Security pros looking to get the down low on how SDN works will get a primer minus any kind of vendor hype when Matt Oswalt, a network software engineer from eBay, walks through the fundamentals.

DevOps and Continuous Delivery

The closer collaboration between developers and operations has spawned a movement towards more iterative, continuous delivery of software within the enterprise. DevOps patterns and the automated technologies that support them are helping departments clear application backlogs and deliver features faster than ever. According to the State of DevOps report last year, organizations that have adopted DevOps report 30 times more deployments with 50 percent fewer failures. But DevOps practices and associated technology are upsetting the security status quo and it'll require work from infosec leaders to get themselves embedded into the process.

Hot Session: DevOps, Mobile Apps & Nordstrom's IT Transformation

A classic case-study type session, this one will illustrate to security people why DevOps is such a big deal for IT to deliver maximum value to the business and why CISOs who impede continuous delivery headway do so at the risk of their relevance to the business.

Business-Led Digital Transformation

DevOps and continuous delivery is actually feeding a larger business trend at hand, namely business-led digital transformation. Increasingly, every type of enterprise today is to some degree or another becoming a technology company, as businesses seek out new lines of business, new ways to generate revenue, improved means to manage supply chains and revolutionized ways to engage customers through disruptive technology. IT's inability to satiate the need for this kind of technology is what's fueling security's shadow IT problem and CISOs must find ways to manage risk without putting the brakes on what has become a top priority for CEOs and boards today.

Hot Session: The New IT: How Ready Are You?

Rub elbows with CIOs and other IT leadership as this session tackles IT's readiness to deal with digital transformation. The author of the book The New IT will walk through case studies and three self-assessment tests IT leadership can perform to understand if their organization is prepped for the new way of delivering technology services.