In what is traditionally a shoulder-to-shoulder mad dash for giveaways, the opening night of RSA was more reminiscent of the last day when most of the people are already homebound. Forget trying to determine who isn't here this year, but consider which companies won't be here in 6 months as witnessed by their dotcom-bomb spending patterns.

Because I always buy a full conference delegate registration for RSA, I am left out in the Moscone lobby area waiting for the expo floor to open. In years past, the crowd waiting in line for their free food and drinks on the Monday night open has looked more like a giant herd of cattle. This year, you could have popped a tent; BBQ'd, and setup a tennis court. The cavernous rooms didn't stop there. Once the floor opened, lines at the bar were nil and corridors were congestion free.

History repeats itself time and time again. Here is a hint, want to know who will be bought in 2009? Just look around at the show floor and take inventory of which vendors are spending like they didn't learn anything about the dotcom bomb days. Which vendors bought bigger booths? Which are giving out free stuff without asking for anything in return? Don't feel pity for the small vendor booths on the perimeter, go congratulate them for spending within their means.

See you at the show!

Managing IT for a software company has its challenges. For me, the lines between efficiency, security and innovation are difficult to draw at a company like nCircle where engineers require some freedom to perform their best. The panelists at the RSA session "Responding to the ignored threat - Macs in the Enterprise" seemed to face the same kind of problems I do.

Based on the war wounds of the speakers, enterprises continue to find challenges when they try to bring Apple products into their security fold. Each of the enterprises has the usual defined security policies and on a daily basis they weigh the risks associated with "grey " areas against the productivity of their users. Today's hot topic was the largely ignored impact of Apple products on security practitioners working hard to reduce enterprise risk.

At Universities the Mac population has been on a significant increase and nearly 50% of all users, students and facility, use Macs. In addition to the Mac, nearly all users either have or want an iPhone. Both these devices make enterprise security problems more daunting. Try telling your new employee he can't have his favorite productivity tools because of security issues.

The panelists each discussed their current environments along with the trends and challenges they face with the Mac, and with all end points. A common opinion among the speakers was that the ease of use built into all modern computers, and especially Macs, have made users less knowledgeable and this is a bad thing for security. A naïve user is more likely to fall victim to attacks like phishing. A naïve user, with a burning desire for Apple products with their inherent lack of centralized management tools spells trouble.

Panelists offered a number of suggestions for tackling these issues. At Baylor, they are actively working hard to deploy Open Directory so that IT security can set basic end point security policies like screen saver passwords and control over patching cycles. At the University of Georgia system, the security team has put a significant emphasis on training. This teams holds brown bag sessions monthly, sends out newsletters and other communication tools help them increase awareness and reduce overall risk.

Sadly, it was evident from the discussion that Apple's continued reluctance to provide enterprise security tools is still causing heartburn for security professionals. Apple has yet to deliver anything on par with the policy systems Microsoft has built into Active Directory.

Maybe it's in my nature to expect something more all the time. Melisa Hathaway's speech lasted maybe 20 minutes and could have been written during the prior administration last year. Any insight into what we can expect for goals from the 60-day review were completely glossed over.

The keynote began with a hokey spoof of the classic TV show Mission Impossible. A narrator with a deep voice gives, Ms Hathaway her mission to secure the nations cybersecurity infrastructure. The message concludes with a warning that her blackberries will self-destruct in 60 days, a weak nod to the technical audience.

Ms Hathaway's speech followed the typical script. She covered historical, current and real threats along with their outcomes. Whether it was the recollection of the movie WarGames or an attack on ATM machines that was years old , the content was a supposed to make the audience feel fear. These obvious tactics were old news for the technical and extremely knowledgeable audience.

When she finished dispensing fear we learned about the enormous effort of the 60-day review she is carrying out. Ms. Hathaway likened the ambitious goal to a marathon, not a sprint, and told us about the numerous organizations consulted. The 60-day review team is targeting private companies, federal, state and local governments as well as to other countries. No surprise here.

In what Ms Hathaway termed as a "trailer", we got a brief glimpse into her 60-day review findings. To no one's surprise the review calls for greater public discourse, private/public partnerships and a significant call to action for the audience sitting directly in front of her.

What we didn't get was any new information or new ideas and no specific course of action beyond what we all already understand to be necessary. It must be my fault for expecting something more. I'll work on pulling back on my expectations in the future.

Putting Simon Crosby and Chris Hoff on the same panel to discuss virtualization security is a recipe for a good lively discussion. At the end of the panel, the audience was not disappointed. In addition to Crosby and Hoff, the panel also included Michael Berman of Catbird and Stephen Herrod of VMware.

The discussion started with some hi jinx by Crosby and Hoff. Crosby handed out gifts to the panelists that included a broken toy sword and a ball and chain. Hoff gave out cigars, one notably much smaller for his nemesis, Mr. Crosby. Despite Chris Hoff's sometimes-flamboyant style, he initially came out mild mannered and on an even keel. His moderate, centrist and thoughtful approach lasted throughout the discussion. Conversely, Simon Crosby of Citrix and huge proponent of Xen spent most of his time trying to put VMWare into a corner. Crosby touted Xen as the most secure hypervisor system because of its open nature and its continuous real life testing because of it's use as the foundation of Amazon's EC2 offering.

Despite the moderator's attempts to encourage the panel to discuss real world security implications of virtualization, the topics kept going back to the implementation and security of VMware products like vShield. In the final moments of the session, the panelists did finally provide a few recommendations worthy of implementing today. One of these nuggets was that insight included most of the security basics necessary for all systems, virtualized or not. Examples of these basics included using configuration guidelines, creating operational plans that include security and risk considerations and building architectures that consider the security implications of the entire virtualization life cycle.

Overall, the virtualizations security panel was entertaining and insightful.

Hard to believe, but RSA 2009 was just last week. I found it to be a very successful show and now it's my turn to recap.

Themes
Every year the marketing team tasks me with finding themes at the show. In no particular order, the top themes between the talks and the booths were: virtualization, cyberwar/cybersecurity, and compliance/policy/regulation.

Attendance
During the first part of the week, I had noted that the attendance appeared to be dramatically lower than usual. To my surprise, as the week progressed, the attendance appeared to be on par with prior years. In fact, a member of the RSA conference PR team emailed me to say that the unofficial count for 2009 is less than 15% off of prior years. Considering current news of financial cutbacks, a drop in less than 15% would appear to be pretty good.

Best Event
Without a doubt, the security bloggers meet up on Wednesday evening was the week's highlight. This was a great chance to chat candidly with bloggers, press and friends.

One Thing I Learned
The Virtualization Security Panel opened up slew of new thoughts for me. Hopefully, I'll have some time to both implement my ideas at work and share them in a blog post.

Special Thanks
Special thanks to a number of journalists who let me share some time with them: George Hulme, Dennis Fisher and Ryan Naraine

All my blog posts from RSA 2009.