Privacy & Security Topics of Interest

What do cherry blossoms, snow, and security have in common? While I didn’t see many cherry blossoms, 1000 people gathered Feb. 6 to 8 for the Reboot Communications 20th Annual Privacy and Security Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.


Notable takeaways:


GPDR was only the beginning. With the California Consumer Protection Act coming into effect January 1, 2020, it is going to become critical to have a good process to identify/consolidate data and handle privacy requests. Many other countries are planning on passing similar laws in the future which will make this space even more important. Doug Boykin from OneTrust gave a great workshop that broke down the requirements and shared the strategies and tactics for managing a global privacy program.


Dr. Ann Cavoukian gave an insightful and inspirational keynote on the need to embed Privacy and Security by design. As privacy laws become more widespread and the costs increase, the need to build privacy and security into processes and software from the beginning will make the difference in their impact on your organization.


Will Privacy be Blockchain’s killer application? From health records to government documents like property deeds, Blockchain stands to make a mark in enabling privacy and ensuring immutable and transparent records.


AI is going to become commonplace in the Privacy and Security landscape. Whether its entity resolution or assessing firewall logs, AI will make a big impact in finding and reconciling a sea of data. Preston Hogue from F5 networks and Adam Frank from IBM gave talks outlining their organization’s efforts to bring AI into mainstream use.


You can live in the cloud (and only have a 180 lb footprint on earth). Jeff Jonas, Senzing founder, had an entertaining keynote that focused on the need for entity resolution in managing enterprise data to find security threats as well as responding to GDPR requests. Jeff related his experience in moving his life into the cloud and reducing his physical footprint to 180 lbs.


Overall, there was some great information presented at the conference. Derek and I enjoyed meeting the participants and absorbing the material from a number of excellent presentations.


Hopefully, everyone survived the snow and made it home safely after so many flights were cancelled.


Presentation files can be found at Reboot Communication’s event website.