As usual it was a great week at RSA Europe, as much for the hallways track as all the other tracks on offer. Whilst it may not be as large as it’s bigger brother in San Francisco the move to Amsterdam from London seems to have given the conference a new sense of purpose and scale. The potential to grow in this location is obvious. But I hope it doesn’t grow too much more; there was always a sense of knowing what was going on and when, and where you were in relation to the auditoriums and speakers. I am sure that sense of perspective is more than lost in the scale of RSA San Francisco.

It still had it’s challenges, all minor. For instance, tea and coffee points that seemed perpetually shut throughout the day, a distinct lack of activities on Wednesday even after a 17:00hrs close, and perhaps the location did not lend itself to the kind of out of hours socialising that London had to offer. For me the Novotel bar became the centre of my networking experience, no bad thing, but I would wager there were a few more hotel bars doing the same thing meaning the networking was seriously fragmented.

The usual suspects were there for me to socialise with as well as some new faces, such as Tor and Kjetil from Norway who were both intelligent and hilarious, a combination I always enjoy. I managed to meet a few more of our industry “luminaries” as well which is always interesting (never meet your heroes!), as well as catch up with others I had met previously and enjoyed their company and insights.

For me the whole conference was focused upon 14:40hrs on the Thursday when I presented “Playing the Game of Thrones: Ensuring the CISO’s Role at the King’s Table”. Not only was I presenting in my own right but I was also presenting content and an approach that I had synthesised from a variety of sources and my previous thoughts and theories. The session went extremely well, was watched by a number of people I know and respect, and was fully attended (with even a couple of people having to stand). Questions at the end were thin on the ground although I had noticed that throughout the conference, but the feedback has been phenomenal. I haven’t had the formal feedback from RSA yet, but their newly introduced conference app allows me to see a certain degree of feedback on both me as a speaker as well as the talk itself.

The slides are above in PDF format, and are also available in Keynote format here. My good friend and evil twin brother Kai Roer kindly filmed the talk as well, and as soon as that is available I will be publishing that on YouTube. One of the key reasons for doing so is to invite more comments on the material itself, as I made a few bold statements that I am sure not everyone would agree with. For instance, the less influence a CISO has, the more prescriptive (and lengthy) the policies are, in turn making them less effectives. This is based on my observations only rather than research, so getting feedback on points such as this helps inform everybody more.

All in all it was a great week, making new friends and meeting old ones and always learning new things almost every hour. Here is my honour roll of folks from the week that made it as memorable as always:

Javvad, Brian, Kai, Kjetil, Tor, David, Dave, Bruce, Tor, John, Dwayne, Quentyn, Neira, Josh, Martin, David & Olivier (my apologies to anyone I left out, it is the fault of my memory and not how memorable your were!).