Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

If you aren't familiar with the Technology Managers Forum, you should be as their events are worth attending and are one of the top five events that Enterprise Architects should attend in 2007. Yesterday, their Security Forum covered emerging trends in enterprise security of which the notion of secure coding practices was the most popular topic.

I especially enjoyed the wisdom shared by Kevin Cayo of Barclays Capital and am sorry that I didn't get to pick his brain afterwards. Hopefully in the near future, he may afford me and my coworkers the opportunity to pick his brain. Anyway, if secure coding practices are not on your radar, I suggest that you start researching it as it is a component of complying with PCI.

Events such as these are especially useful in that they cover topics and provide perspectives not usually found by talking with industry analysts. Currently, Lori Rowland of the Burton Group provides the deepest coverage of this space with analysts from Gartner running a distant second with nothing in sight from Forrester.

I also enjoyed the panel on enterprise security and individual privacy. Usually you can find these two topics covered in a standalone manner but when converged uncovers some things that enterprises need to consider. Maybe, for all those folks in the blogosphere commenting on SOA and Identity could start talking about how to make privacy constructs available as data moves throughout multiple enterprise systems.

A familiar face at this conference is Warren Axelrod, information security officer for US Trust whom is always enjoyable to listen to. I would encourage folks to pick up his book: Outsourcing Information Security as his wealth of experience in working in high profile situations is something all can learn from.

This event uncovered several intriguing vendors which I would love to see the folks at industry analyst firm Redmonk engage including but not limited to: Akibia, NeoAccell, Redseal and Sendio.

The funny thing is that with secure coding practices being the number one topic, I would have expected to run across vendors such as OunceLabs, Klocwork, BEA, LogLogic, SPIDynamics and Watchfire but they were all missing in action. I suspect though that they will smarten up and get booths for the October event...