NaviSite’s (News - Alert) Chief Security Officer Allen Allison will participate in a panel discussion at the eighth annual 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, the premier international event for CIOs and senior IT executives to become better business leaders.

NaviSite, a Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable company, is a leading provider of cloud computing, managed cloud services, managed application services and enterprise hosting.

At the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which takes place May 18 in Cambridge, Mass., Allen will join Michael K. Daly, director of IT Security Services at Raytheon (News - Alert) Company, Kurt Hakenson, chief technologist of Electronic Systems Sector for Northrup Grumman Corporation, and David Saul, senior vice president and chief scientist at State Street for a discussion entitled “New Trends in Cyber Security and Privacy Protection.”

Owen McCusker, a principal analyst for Sonalysts, Inc., will moderate the panel discussion which will take place from 3:15 to 4:15 p.m. EST at the Kresge Little Theatre at MIT (News - Alert) in Cambridge.

More than 800 CIOs and senior IT executives will be attending the 2011 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, which will take place Wednesday, May 18, 2011, 7:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The symposium theme is "Beyond the Crossroads - How will the CIO Role Evolve in the Digital Business World?" More than 50 thought leaders from a wide range of industries and government, as well as leading academics from MIT and the MIT Sloan School of Management will speak.

Allison is not new to covering pertinent topics as recently Allen submitted a blog post for “InfoSecurity Magazine to discuss the benefits of public clouds versus private clouds.

The cloud computing expert contended that a cloud, whether it’s public or private, offers many benefits, such as having a lower total cost of ownership.

Allison explained that the debate about pubic versus private clouds “is not just about which solution is best” but that it “extends to the very definition of cloud.”

He defined the public cloud as, “a multi-tenant computing environment that can deliver on-demand resources in a scalable, elastic manner that is both measured and metered, and often charged, on a per-usage basis.”