As Interop New York opens its doors for the first time this week, the focus will be on security and the effect of government regulations on network design and operations.

Vendors, including Avaya, Aventail and Lockdown Networks, are using the show as a platform to launch new security products, and the keynote list has been revised to add a talk on security services.

AT&T pulled President David Dorman from the list of speakers and replaced him with the company's chief information security officer Ed Amoroso, who plans to outline AT&T's road map for corporate security services. "The corporation wants to stress security," a spokeswoman said, but declined to say whether Amoroso will announce new services.

The heightened interest in keeping networks safe stems in part from increasing government and industry regulations that make business executives more responsible for data security, says Allan Carey, an analyst with IDC, whose report on security has just been released. The study, called "2005 Global Information Security Workforce," finds that about 21% of CEOs now bear ultimate responsibility for information security, up from about 12% last year.

High-profile thefts of personal customer information and the use of computer forensics to uncover corporate wrongdoing are prompting business executives to seek training in these technologies, Carey says. "Shifts in attacks, tactics and [attack] vectors require security professionals to fine-tune existing skills and learn new techniques," the study says (see graphic).

Theft of student information is a top concern of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Hunts Point, N.Y., says the school's CIO Howard Weiner. The problem is compounded by the use of laptops by the roughly 1,000 undergraduates, who take their machines with them when they travel around the world during their year at sea. "They come back severely compromised," Weiner says.

To address these problems, the school beta-tested access-control gear from Lockdown Networks that will be announced at Interop.

New software for its Enforcer appliance makes it possible to carry out network security policies on smaller and smaller switches, giving security executives tighter control of each machine on the network.

Enforcer can impose access policies via unmanaged hubs and switches, not just via switches that are networked under a unified management system.

The gear first checks that computers meet security configuration policies before they are admitted to the network, and then controls what resources they are allowed to reach by enforcing policies at switch ports.

The appliance has dramatically cleaned up student computers at the Merchant Marine Academy, Weiner says. Enforcer security scans found more than 4,000 infections that could turn the student laptops into slaves on bot nets, he says.

Non-tech execs seek knowledge

This trend toward non-technical executives seeking IT knowledge is reflected by the makeup of people pre-registered for the show, says Lenny Heyman, the general manager for Interop. The list of attendees shows that 45% of those registered hold general business titles, not technical titles, he says.

Growing security concerns also include keeping businesses up and running in the face of terrorism or natural disasters, Carey says.

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