Thanks for making RSA 2017 a huge success
This year there were 43,000 people in attendance at what is the largest security convention of the year, RSA Conference. The attendance is absolutely staggering and is a amazing demonstration of the size of the overall information (dare I say cyber) security market.
Signal Sciences played a role in the spectacle by sponsoring a booth on the show floor and taking meetings in the executive suite at the nearby Park Central Hotel. While you can never touch every person at an event of this magnitude, the overwhelming support, and number of people that searched us out on the show floor, with over 500 booths, was amazing. Thank you to each and everyone one of you. The stories we shared, discussions we had, and the interest you showed in the Signal Sciences solution was astounding!
Security Trends and Take Aways
As always, the show floor and conference sessions at the event provide a glimpse into what the current trends in security technologies look like. As practitioners in the security world, you are constantly bombarded with advertising, tag-lines, messaging, and branding that are all meant to give you the idea that vendor X has the latest and greatest security gizmo.
At the end of the RSA, we were left with these key takeaways:
- DevOps has expanded into Security in a big way. 5 years ago, Josh Corman and Gene Kim got on stage at RSA and explained DevOps was coming. Three years ago, DevOps Connect started running a summit the first day of RSA. Fast forward to today where there is not only the summit, but an entire track dedicated to DevOps, not to mention the word DevOps on vendor advertisements on the expo floor and even plastered on the side of city buses. DevOps is here to stay.
- Cyber usage is going down. It hasn’t evaporated but the word cyber echoed less through the halls this year than RSA’s of past. Over time we expect this trend to continue as the framing of what security is and how it works is democratized. No longer can it hide behind the dark art of “cyber.”
- Artificial Intelligence is on the rise for security. The number of companies claiming artificial intelligence is on the rise. If you look closely, you will see that security doesn’t mean artificial intelligence like the rest of the world means it. Most companies are rebranding their machine learning and big data efforts of RSAs past and now calling it artificial intelligence.
Talks we loved
- John Willis opening keynote at DevOps Connect: DevSecOps showed us the future of DevOps and where security has to transition.
- Rich Mogull gave a wake-up call to the security industry, but will we listen?
- Shannon Lietz (devsecops) brought tons of good advice for security in the future including Rugged as a foundation for their work at Intuit.
- Our very own Zane Lackey did an excellent talk on bridging the SDLC in Agile and DevOps to help security professionals tackle these new challenges.
- James Wickett also from Signal Sciences had a talk on the future of appsec and serverless.
Signal Sciences’ industry first Next Generation Web Application Firewall was built in response to our frustrations of trying to use legacy WAFs while enabling business initiatives like DevOps and cloud adoption. The Signal Sciences NGWAF works seamlessly across cloud, physical, and containerized infrastructure, providing security prioritization based on where your applications are targeted, and blocking attacks without breaking production traffic.
