ESG Blogs

My esteemed colleague, Doug Cahill, did a great job at the RSA Conference with a killer presentation on hybrid cloud security. Unfortunately, Doug’s presentation occurred on Thursday afternoon, when many conference attendees were catching flights home, packing up their booths, or recovering at a bar somewhere else in San Francisco. Despite the timing, about 150 souls showed up, but I’m guessing that Doug’s conference room would have been overflowing if his presentation was on Tuesday rather than Thursday.

This year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco was held under the theme of “Now Matters.” To play off those semantics, one could clearly see the continuing shift in this industry from it being (in the past) all about matters of IT security, to (now) a world where IT security really matters. That’s not just playing with words - it’s impossible to over-state the importance of the endeavor that this event reflects and represents; but equally the burgeoning user needs and vibrant vendor competition creates a giddy atmosphere, in all senses of the word.

In this video, ESG analysts Mark Bowker and Jon Oltsik run through some of the top topics they will be tuning into at RSA Conference 2018. Mark and Jon home in on how identity has become the control plane and how the software-defined perimeter is impacting the CISO's decision making process and future investments. 

I couldn’t attend the RSA Conference this year but many cybersecurity professionals and my ESG colleagues told me that incident response automation and orchestration was one of the hottest topics in the halls of the Moscone Center, through the bar at the W hotel, and even at the teahouse on the garden at Yerba Buena.   

In this second of a two-part video blog series, my colleague Jon Oltsik and I discuss some of the themes and takeaways from RSA Conference 2017.

Closing the cloud security readiness gap with platforms: Many vendors at RSA were offering cloud security solutions to help organization close the gap between the use of the cloud services within their company and their readiness to secure that use. These solutions spanned the gamut of “from,” “in,” and “to” cloud security with respect to security from the cloud (i.e., security-as-a-service\SECaaS), infrastructure security (workloads, APIs), and cloud app security (i.e., CASB), respectively. Compounding the readiness gap is good old heterogeneity -- most orgs use many cloud apps and multiple IaaS providers. In fact, ESG research reveals that 75% of organizations consuming IaaS services today do so from more than one CSP. These adoption dynamics create the need for cross app and cross cloud coverage which is why major players such as Cisco, Trend Micro, and Symantec are highly focused on the breadth of their cloud security portfolios while cloud security specialists such as CloudPassage, Netskope, Illumio, vArmour, Threat Stack, and others are also helping companies close the gap with offerings that continue to offer both breadth across cloud services and depth of functionality.  

RSA Conference 2017 is now a wrap and blogs such as these that attempt to summarize such a content rich event are challenged to do so in any sort of brevity, but, alas, I will try. Colleague Jon Oltsik, who fought being placed on the injured reserve list the week before RSA and missed the event for the first time in over a dozen years, and I offer a review of just some of the news from the show in this first of two video blogs. Here are some of the threads we pull on. 

Earlier this week, I posted a blog about my expectations for endpoint security at the upcoming RSA Conference.  Similarly, here’s what I anticipate hearing about network security:

With what is expected to be the largest RSA Conference to date just around the corner, my colleague Jon Oltsik and I share some thoughts on what we are expecting at this year’s seminal cybersecurity event in this video. We discuss the broad-based nature of ransomware, with commentary on how “rearview mirror ransomware protection” will address certain tiers of ransomware while new blended ransomware attacks, as well as those that target back-end infrastructure, will require additional controls and techniques. One such technique being applied in many cybersecurity products is machine learning, for which we frame its role in the context of a layered defense. We also consider how the rapid evolution of the cloud security product category, driven by the broad adoption of cloud service, could be an area of functional convergence and note the need for a security operations and analytic platform architecture (SOAPA) for hybrid cloud environments. On the topic of cloud, we also note the compelling benefits of cloud-delivered security solutions (security-as-a-service) for operational efficiency at cloud scale.

As our final act of RSA Conference 2016 coverage, I wanted to share the video that my colleague Jon Oltsik and I recorded to wrap up our thoughts from San Francisco: