Eli highlight of RSA Conference

Last week I left sunny Seattle and flew to rain-soaked San Francisco to attend the RSA Conference (El Nino years certainly make for odd weather reversals). While the weather did its best to dampen things, the show was very well attended and the expo floor was packed.

The vendors with whom I spoke seemed very pleased with the attendance, with some of the vendors enjoying visitors several people deep in some cases.

While there might have been fewer vendors at this year’s conference compared to a couple of years ago, the attendance was substantially higher. This indicates that the security industry continues to mature through consolidation, that the interest in security is more robust than ever and even that the economy in the San Francisco Bay Area is finally improving.

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Last week I left sunny Seattle and flew to rain-soaked San Francisco to attend the RSA Conference (El Nino years certainly make for odd weather reversals). While the weather did its best to dampen things, the show was very well attended and the expo floor was packed.

The vendors with whom I spoke seemed very pleased with the attendance, with some of the vendors enjoying visitors several people deep in some cases.

While there might have been fewer vendors at this year’s conference compared to a couple of years ago, the attendance was substantially higher. This indicates that the security industry continues to mature through consolidation, that the interest in security is more robust than ever and even that the economy in the San Francisco Bay Area is finally improving.

Although there were lots of interesting vendors and products at the show, one of the more intriguing products was Eli, a combination of a wireless gateway, firewall and managed service offering intended primarily for home users. The Eli appliance, slightly larger than a typical wireless router, includes a firewall, spam-blocking and anti-virus capabilities, content filtering, a four-port switch and VPN support, among other features.

Eli is intended for the home market, but a significant portion of that market consists of remote workers, telecommuters and others that work out of their homes for large employers that need to provide their workers with robust security. The managed service aspect of Eli updates all of the product features automatically for a relatively modest fee per month.

Although Eli would be useful for the typical home user with a broadband connection, I believe there will be two primary markets for the device: large employers with a significant number of home-based workers, and ISPs.

For large employers, supporting home-based workers with the growing array of security capabilities necessary to protect them from spam, viruses, spyware, etc., is a disruptive and time-consuming task for IT staff. Allowing a managed service provider to support this tier of workers can make IT’s life a lot easier.

For ISPs, the Eli appliance, or one like it, could go a long way toward reducing the number of zombies in their networks - providing the appliance free for a two-year commitment to broadband service, for example, would help to offset the cost of this device, which sells for about $200 at retail.

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