Cloud computing at the RSA show

While too many of the pitches on the expo floor at this year's RSA Conference were about how various products or services could make you PCI DSS compliant, way too many of the talks this year were about cloud computing. Few of these talks really seemed to have anything new and interesting to say. Some seemed to be just thinly-veiled pitches for a cloud computing offering from vendors who had essentially bought speaking slots at the show with their sponsorship dollars.

Now, while cloud computing can be a very useful technology in some cases, it's also one that can create some interesting security challenges. But while talk after talk went on and on about the security challenges of cloud computing, one fairly obvious approach was rarely mentioned: encrypt your data before you put it into an external cloud computing environment.

The RSA Conference started out as a conference about cryptography. Despite this bit of history and the fact that cryptography can go a long way towards solving some of the tricky problems that cloud computing can cause, it was rarely mentioned at this year's conference. This struck me as being a bit ironic.