Horse's Ass 2

After the 2006 RSA conference, we made special note of a truly distressful talk given by the CEO of ISS (a security focused division of IBM) who started off telling a story (about how a horse's ass determined the width of roads in ancient Rome which ends up being the limiting factor on the size of the Space Shuttle's engines) which he apparently thought was true but which turns out to be an one of those urban legends that circulates through the Internet ever couple of years. We wondered -- if he got duped by an Internet propagated urban legend, how relevant was the rest of his view on security trends? So it was with great anticipation when we attended Val Rahmani's keynote at RSA. Val is the articulate General Manager of IBM's ISS division. Although Val is a good public speaker, she seemed to miss the fact that she was talking to a room full of security experts. She got off to on the wrong foot by using the line "IBM is getting out of the security business" as a public speaking device to generate interest (it turns out, of course, not to be true). Her talk had lots of cute animation of things like someone rolling a rock up a hill to illustrate her observations that companies aren't getting the most out of their security offerings. What she doesn't seem to understand, perhaps because it hasn't occurred to her, is that her company has been one of the market leaders supplying the very products that she's labeling as ineffective and disappointing. RSA sessions are composed of sophisticated security experts who aren't patient with some patronizing banter about "the new security mandate." The problems with security that she was citing might have more to do with the lack of completeness of the products being sold rather than the lack of understanding of security managers of how to do their jobs. We think the audience wants, and deserves more.