From day one, people told me that security should be proactive and not reactive. At ASIS International 2011 this month, thousands of security professionals will talk business, budgets, technology, threats and the need to keep one step ahead. One step ahead of whom and what is the challenge that makes reactive the unfortunate fallback.

This issue of Security magazine features the most influential people in security. An annual spotlight, the list boasts the best and brightest. But anyone can be influential, one way or another. Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another, said Napoleon Hill, the author of many success books. A Time magazine poll of the most influential people recently found Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao on top. If you know him from the boxing ring, his influence spread wider last year when he won a seat in his country’s Congress — and won it by a landslide.

Who would have thought that if we put on an international terror trial in Chicago with a cast of bad guys, including a self-confessed two-timing spy, secret documents, a shady Chicago businessman and testimony of alleged involvement by Pakistani ex-military officers in the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 170 people including six U.S. citizens, who would have figured that no one would show up for the trial?

My first meeting with security executives in Chicago in the early 1980s included some of those attendees getting into a fist fight, due in great part to the “two-fer” beverage policy at the now and should-have-been-then-closed policy of the Chicago Millionaire’s Club. No doubt, it’s good to see passion. But, overall, security has been in an obvious struggle within their organizations for many years, more often over budgets.

And then found. Among the cameras, servers, alarms, readers, smart cards and other dazzlers at last month’s ISC West in Las Vegas, the technology-centric security trade show, a reasonably new face appeared, seemingly out of thin air. Call it cloud computing or hosted services or remote managed services or software as a service or video as a service.