It has been a busy month, where I spent most of my time studying for my CISSP exam, as such I failed to post this about the first ever virtual spice world conference from September. This is the annual conference for all Spiceworks fans, and was a great example of how a virtual conference should be. This was an incredibly well thought out conference, designed for the virtual world. All the normal vendor engagement and networking elements were included, just like an in person event. The sessions were spaced out with time to network or grab a drink in between, and the sessions were all timed perfectly to fit within a 45 minute slot including time for Q&A.
I have been a Spiceworks user for the past 10 years, using the great help desk and inventory management system when I was running my own company. And now just being a part of the community. I have attended a couple of Spice World conferences in the past and found them to be a great source of information and a chance to hear from fellow IT professionals. This year was no exception, the mix of sessions was a combination of polished vendor presentations and a little more rough around the edges community speakers. Having said that the vendor presentations were for more informative and generic, not a massive sales pitch. The community speakers provided some great insights as to the issues being faced first hand, along with how they were resolving these.
I was quite pleased to see a significant focus on security issues this time around, there were a large number of sessions which had a security focus. This coupled with the non-security focused sessions generally incorporating some degree of secure thought processes.
Whilst none of the sessions provided, to me, new concepts or ideas, there were some great takeaways. It pros are taking security seriously and are thinking in the right direction, with defence in depth being a core theme. Intelligence led threat assessments are becoming more commonplace, with an appreciation on how Cybercrime is a business. Data Privacy is also becoming a major factor in companies strategies, and the burden of this is being passed to already overburdened IT teams.