Yesterday I attended the CyberSicherheitsForum Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart. Program link: https://cybersicherheitsforum-bw.de/
For non-German readers: Baden-Württemberg is one of Germany’s federal states (Bundesländer), and an important IT region in its own right. Companies like SAP SE and Schwarz Digits are based here, and the Open Source ecosystem is active as well. When the state talks about digital sovereignty or security strategies, it is usually backed by real capabilities in industry and administration.
The on-site part of the conference was well attended, with a large online audience as well. Interior Minister Thomas Strobl opened the event. One consistent theme throughout the day was Baden-Württemberg’s ambition to strengthen digital sovereignty, with Open Source explicitly seen as part of that path. From an rsyslog perspective this is relevant because transparent, verifiable protocol handling is one of the small but important components underlying higher-level security systems.
I tend to visit events like this to get a feeling for what is emerging locally. Regional activities often give early hints about broader developments, and Baden-Württemberg has a good mix of public sector, industry and OSS. Local proximity sometimes helps later on with PoCs or follow-up work, although this is not the main reason for attending.
The international segment was especially interesting. Representatives from Finland, Luxembourg, Israel and Korea shared elements of their national cybersecurity strategies. The details differed, but the direction was familiar. The threat environment continues to intensify, and trustworthy protocol data remains essential for meaningful analysis and response. That aligns well with rsyslog’s long-term focus on integrity and reliability.
During the breaks I had a focused discussion with two colleagues about protocol formats, standardization and their practical challenges. I prefer not to go into details here, but the exchange was useful and gave me a few new angles to think about. As usual, logging becomes more complex once you dig below the surface.
Overall, the conference reinforced how central protocol processing remains in modern security architectures. It rarely attracts attention, but it is one of the layers that needs to work reliably if anything above it is supposed to be trustworthy. I am taking a number of impressions home, and some of them will probably influence future work in rsyslog.