by Jason Rohlf – March 4, 2010 

Greetings from San Francisco, California! This fabulous city is the backdrop for RSA Conference 2010, which brings together vendors and professionals with a need to protect and manage information, often considered the most valuable resources companies possess. The theme of this year’s conference is “Security Decoded”, and everywhere I go I see images of the famous Rosetta Stone, perhaps the most famous encryption key ever created.

Until the Rosetta Stone’s discovery in 1798, Ancient Egypt’s society and culture was locked in the mystery of hieroglyphics. In the decades that followed the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, experts and scholars were able to unlock the secrets of the Egyptians language. While the stone itself is essentially a statement that certain Egyptian priests were exempt from tax (must be nice), the implications of decoding this ancient language were far more tremendous from an academic and historic perspective.

As I learned more about the Rosetta Stone, I realized its story fit well with the theme of RSA 2010 for a couple of reasons. On one hand, encrypting information is widely regarded as a best practice for protecting critical information from those who would seek to exploit it. Yet I also see this gathering of professionals who come together to exchange ideas information as a good analogy of the Rosetta Stone. When people of differing backgrounds, upbringings, career paths and perspectives come together to share thoughts and ideas on the issues they are dealing with, there is a very good chance that one person’s perspective can prove to be the spark that allows others to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable. This is the power of an event like RSA—pooling together individual bits of information to create a tapestry of knowledge that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This is my first time at the RSA Conference, and this experience has given me the opportunity to speak with numerous people who have been kind enough to share their perspectives and insights on the problems they are facing. Although RSA is primarily a security conference, many of the conversations that my colleagues and I have had about Archer’s solutions go beyond how we can help them track and manage their information security issues. They also want to know how this particular segment of their GRC program plays into their larger efforts to demonstrate enterprise-wide governance, risk and compliance. How can they integrate all of the pieces of their program into a uniform, consolidated view? How can they make senior executives care about the problems they are trying to manage? In these cases, Archer strives to become the key that these professionals can use to decode these issues.

I look forward to more lively conversations as the conference wraps up today, and I appreciate having the opportunity to meet so many talented people. Who knows, maybe I even played a part in helping decode some mysteries this week.