The 27K Summit: The First U.S. Conference Focusing on the ISO/IEC 27001 Family of Standards

Ron Ross, NIST Fellow, delivers his keynote presentation

Last week, May 12th through 14th, 2015, through the efforts of atsec information security corporation, the very first "27K: The Security Summit for the Americas" was held in Austin, Texas. In fact, this was the first conference focused on the ISO/IEC 27001 standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) ever organized in the U.S.

The ISO/IEC 27001 standard is a globally accepted standard for ISMS. It is widely used in Europe and Asia, but to date it has not been as widely adopted in the United States, this first conference of its kind in the U.S. was held last week in Austin, Texas.

atsec initiated the organization of the conference due to the history of atsec and the ISO/IEC 27001 standard. Sal La Pietra, atsec CEO, in his closing remarks at the conference said, "We organized this conference because we believe in the 27K standard and atsec owes the foundation and growth of the company to the standard." Much of atsec's early business in Europe was related to the ISO 27001 standard. atsec was assisted in the development of the conference by Cyberdefenses and BSI.

A day of pre-conference workshops was followed by the conference opening with keynote presentations by

• David Cannon, President & CEO, CertTest Training Center,
• Ron Ross, Fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),
• Scott Bullock CCSK, CISSP, CISM, Information Security Manager, Websense Cloud Services,

The conference was capped with a summary panel discussion on the subject of Integrating ISO/IEC 27001 with Existing Management Systems. The panel was moderated by Vern Williams, Chief Security Officer of CyberDefenses, and consisted of Fiona Pattinson, VP of atsec information security, John DiMaria ISO Product Manager of BSI Group America, Timothy Woodcome, Director of NQA USA, and David Ochel, Senior Information Security Manager of Rêv Worldwide. It was clear from the enthusiastic participation and discussion of the attendees that a conference on the subject of ISO/IEC 27001 has been needed and was valued highly by the community.

Vern Williams moderates the summary panel

In his closing remarks, Sal La Pietra, atsec CEO, stated that just as with the International Cryptographic Module Conference (ICMC), also initially organized by atsec, "We are not interested in owning the conference. We are giving it back to the community we managed to bring together for these two days. Of course we will continue to support future efforts, but we will discuss in what way after we see the results of this conference."

Thank you to everyone for attending! We are truly sorry that the typically beautiful Austin Spring weather chose not to cooperate on the week of the conference.

The conference organizers would like to thank Vern Williams and Willibert Fabritius for their invaluable contribution to the organization of the conference. We would also like to thank all of the conference sponsors: BSI, CyberDefenses, Inc., SGS, UL DQS Inc., DEKRA Certification, Inc., National Quality Assurance, The Open Group, SecuraStar, and Developing Telecoms. We are also grateful for the able assistance of Bill Rutledge of Cnxtd (“Connected”) Event Media Services.