Over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with the Upper Midwest Security Alliance (UMSA) as the OWASP representative to the board (although I’ve had to step-down from that role due to other commitments) and with the Secure360 conference.  For those of you not familiar with UMSA, it’s the non-profit organization that produces Secure360.  Importantly, it’s also an organization that represents a community of other security, risk, compliance, and business continuity organizations and works to serve as a centralizing point within that broader community.

The Minnesota chapters of ISSA and ISACA are founding members of UMSA as are the Business Continuity Planners Association (BCPA) and AdvanceIT Minnesota.  Other organizations (like OWASP) have representation at UMSA and work with the organization on promoting the goals of the collective community.  If you aren’t familiar with Secure360 you need to make yourself familiar – the conference takes place annually in St. Paul, MN and brings a wide group of professionals together for education and networking purposes.  It has become a big conference and is getting bigger still this year…

While I’ve been involved with Secure360 for a couple of years, this year I was asked by the team to lead the speaker selection team.  While I might question their choice (and they might be as well at this point…), I did accept and I’ve had a good time working with the team to prepare for and select the ‘lineup’ for Secure360 2013.

As I mentioned, the conference continues to grow year-over-year and last year we attracted a number of attendees from both coasts as well as from the upper Midwest.  I would like to think that this is a reflection of the quality of speaker that we’ve had at the conference in years past.

I’m very confident that we will continue that tradition of quality, insightful speakers again this year.  Our format is to recruit keynotes and featured speakers that can provide thoughtful (and thought-provoking) content for all of our attendees and to ask the professional community itself to provide useful, insightful presentations.  We received a large number of very high-quality submissions this year from some very high-profile and interesting people and, after several long rounds of review and voting, the team has settled on the speakers for 2013.  Please take a look at the initial schedule for Secure360 here..  Hopefully we’ll have more information up soon, but we’re still waiting for paperwork to be completed and returned…

Please note as well that we have attempted (and I think we succeeded) in making this a well-rounded schedule of speakers.  Presentations cover the range of security, risk, and compliance topics and are geared towards a variety of audiences.  We have tried to find the right mix of technical and/or strategic focus and have also included some important discussions on personal and career growth.

Regardless, I wanted to just thank the entire team (particularly Nicole and Susan) for the work that’s gone into the speaker selections for 2013 and to encourage your attendance at the conference.  Secure360 has become much more than a ‘regional security conference’ and it is attracting attention nationally as a conference worth attending.  I hope that you can join us this year and thank you.