CSI: Washington

3:35 PM -- It's the waning hours before the Computer Security Institute's annual conference gets rolling next week. What I like best about having our big conference at the end of the year is that it automatically pushes the focus forward to next year. How are we going to keep our IT security programs effective in the coming months?

At many organizations, budgets have already been submitted, so the broad outlay for next year may be settled. That just leaves the hard questions. How do we actually get this stuff implemented? What kinds of policies do we need to introduce to make new programs successful?

I believe, for instance, that next year is going to be a year that sees many changes in how organizations handle identity management. One of our keynotes, therefore, is Kim Cameron, who is in charge of all things identity at Microsoft. But it's not Cameron's company affiliation that makes me particularly delighted to have him addressing our attendees. It's that he's both a seminal thinker in identity management (see his seven laws) and someone who's overseen a huge development in the field -- the introduction of Microsoft's CardSpace.

I always think I'm going to be a diligent blogger at our CSI events, and then I get busy and nothing gets blogged. You'll almost certainly do better checking out the event through coverage here on Dark Reading and elsewhere. Heck, there's still time to register and join us yourself next week in D.C.

And if you can't make it to the conference, don't despair. We'll be recording and sharing more of the conference this year than we have in the past, so watch this space -- and our CSI Website -- for more in the not-too-distant future.

– Robert Richardson is director of the Computer Security Institute (CSI) . He recognizes that the last sentence of this blog entry is pretty darned nebulous. Press him for details at [email protected].