Q&A: InfoSec World Conference

Dina Dvinov is the Conference Marketing Manager at the MIS Training Institute and in this interview discusses the InfoSec World Conference.

Introduce InfoSec World Conference to our readers.
InfoSec World is MIS Training Institute’s flagship security conference and expo, held annually in Orlando. This year’s conference runs April 19 – 21, with extra summits and workshops taking place before and after the conference. At InfoSec World, about 1300 information security professionals gather for three days to share their experiences and products and to learn the latest trends and techniques in data loss prevention.

There are many quality information security events all over the world. In your opinion, what makes InfoSec World unique in comparison to other conferences?
InfoSec World, unlike many other events on the market, has a mostly vendor-neutral agenda. It is highly unusual to find an event of this many tracks that maintains the educational content as the key element. Most other events I can think of that get to this size are based on the trade show model where the exhibit drives both content and time on the floor. Also, InfoSec world draws a very high caliber of attendees who are primarily management.

What are your keynote speakers this year?

• Managing Security Risk and Complexity: Marching to the Drums of Business and National Security by Michael Assante, Vice President and Chief Security Officer, North American Electric Reliability Corporation
• Technology Trends that will Shape Tomorrow’s Organization and Change Your Life by Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist and Distinguished Engineer, IBM Entity Analytics
• Schneier on Security by Bruce Schneier, Chief Technology Officer, BT Global Services
• The State of Cyber Security: How the Information Assurance Paradigm is Shifting and What That Means To You by Israel Martinez, Co-Chair, The National Cyber Security Council.

What topics will dominate the speeches at this year’s edition of InfoSec World conference?
Every year InfoSec World focuses on perennial problems such as strengthening firewalls, defending applications, managing identity and the latest legal concerns. This year extra attention is being given to benefits of moving towards a cloud-based model and migrating to a secure virtualized environment.

The recession has hit basically every industry, yet the information security sector keeps turning out surprisingly good results each quarter. Has this positive trend reflected itself in the form of attendee numbers and sponsors for InfoSec World Conference?
Early registrations are looking very promising this year! The conference to date is tracking with 2007 numbers and we are more than doubled as to where we were last year. While last year was a slightly down year for us, this one seems to be bringing back some of the people who probably were not able to attend due to budget cuts. Things do appear to be a little bit slower on the expo side. While many companies prefer to book closer to the event date and the event has moved further out into late April, it may be also due to budgetary cuts within companies for trade shows. However, we are still very confident that the expo will be a strong side to the event and deliver a lot of useful tools and information to all the attendees.