CWHK: What are the technology trends that you observe?

GW: The culture of compliance: whether for the healthcare industry or European data privacy laws, each region has specific laws and regulations that CIOs need to be aware of. This culture of compliance is forcing CIOs to take different approaches to address their information security problems.

When we went through the Y2K issue, we put in a lot of work to prepare for one single problem, but moved on after that. These compliance issues [form] a continuing trend of more and more compliance initiatives you have to deal with. If you take each one of them and deal independently, it's not very efficient. So instead, you should put in a security framework, which allows you to comply with all the new initiatives.

The second major trend is mobility. There is an explosion of wireless access, converged devices, voice and data over WLAN. Business executives are seeking for access to corporate information from anywhere with multiple devices. That's challenging many CIOs and CSOs to build a secure environment to support that demand.