Q&A: Andrew Walls, Research Director, Gartner Australia

Andrew Walls, Gartner's local security analyst reveals data leakage and cloud computing will be hot topics during September's Gartner IT Security Summit.

What's different this year?
Walls: “We are trying a slightly different approach this year we are holding a one day security Summit in Singapore on the Friday before, simply because our Asian audience doesn’t want to travel to Sydney and our Sydney office doesn’t want to travel to Singapore.

“Each of these markets has different priorities so in certain categories, for example in London, identity management is big stuff. We tend to feature more on identity management topics.”

What do Australian audiences look for?
Walls: “In Australia, we tend to have more of a comprehensive coverage of security but with a practical focus. We have very little theoretical discussion and we don’t tend to focus too much on what’s going to happen in ten years time. We focus on what you need, to be secure today and what you anticipate in the next 18 months.

“There is a similar focus in Singapore, but [because] they are not cutting-edge adopters Gartner needs to go into a lot of issues. There is not as much of technology focus. Each place is somewhat different.”

What are the big issues this year?
Walls: “The top issue at the Sydney Summit is data security. In general it’s a high line issue for everyone. We’ve seen a lot of very public data security failures over the past couple of years part of that’s due to the breach disclosure laws of the US, making it impossible to hide these things anymore.

“We haven’t seen that much happening here in Australia but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been going on. Being a security person I assume that these terrible things are happening here but no body talks about them. But, I might be wrong, maybe we’re not."