A Moment in Time: SECtember

Our fortunes are often dictated not just by what we do, but when we do it. Understanding that special “moment in time” when we can do great things with our lives, our business, our world is not easy. In my mentoring of colleagues, I try to stress the importance of being able to take a “step back” to gain awareness of the confluence of trends and situations that make our goals more possible than ever.

As we emerge from this pandemic, it is clear that when we look back on 2020 and 2021, this was the moment in time that cloud computing became the default information technology and the launching point for an explosion of creativity and transformation. Businesses had to pivot to cloud to provide IT services on demand to a dislocated workforce. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have failed. Those that replaced them are “born in the cloud.” It is also the moment in time when, in our industry, cybersecurity has shifted its foundation to cloud security. The investments we are seeing, public and private, are shifting massively into cybersecurity companies that are cloud at the core.

This brings us to SECtember. This is the first of what will be our annual flagship conference. Security in September in Seattle, one of the world's strategic centers of cloud = SECtember. Many people talk about the “New Normal” and say that we are never going back to conferences the way we did in 2019. This is true, and would be true even if there were no pandemic. However, the immersive remote collaboration technologies are likely a decade away from providing an “almost in-person” experience. Even with that, there are certain conversations that cybersecurity professionals are only comfortable having face to face. We observed several “watch parties” put together for community members to get back together while watching the virtual RSA Conference this past May. We strongly believe that now is the moment in time for an intimate, in-person conference that provides a cloud-centric view of cybersecurity today, coming from the organization that created the cloud security ecosystem.

Today, our cybersecurity community is challenged to manage risks, achieve compliance and create business value at an unprecedented scale and speed. Our profession is becoming core to every country’s national security posture. Our impact on the global economy is palpable. We have major problems to address that cannot be solved in isolation. Growing our workforce, increasing their baseline of knowledge and collaboration is how we are going to succeed. Unfortunately, malicious hackers also understand this moment in time: vulnerable targets, exorbitantly valued cryptocurrencies, commoditized malware – it is a great time for them to accelerate attacks.

Come join us for SECtember, September 13-17, 2021, at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. We have several training courses planned with the heart of the week being the CxO Trust Summit for cybersecurity executives on Sept 14 and the main conference on Sept 15-16. We are excited to announce former CISA chief Chris Krebs is a confirmed keynote and we will be name dropping several leading cloud and cybersecurity experts over the next several weeks. Now is our moment in time to seize upon this generational shift in technology and build the cybersecurity strategies and solutions we need together.

Update 11/2/21:

Access the presentation decks from SECtember 2021 here.

Watch recorded sessions and panels from SECtember 2021 here.