The 25th 2016 RSA Conference, held in San Francisco, CA, has brought together the record number of attendees from all over the world to discuss major IT industry trends and upcoming challenges. For the past years, RSA Conference has been raising different hot topics, from unstructured data governance, IT auditing and network monitoring to threat detection and new cost-effective approaches to infrastructure management. This year the RSA Conference continued to provide an exclusive look at common security concerns, demonstrating more clearly than ever that the most pressing problems remain nearly unchanged over the years, while the methods that address these issues are rapidly evolving.
We have summarized the most interesting highlights from the RSA 2016 and identifies five buzzwords that will matter most to the IT community in the following year:
- Threat. Each vendor has its own vision of what cyber security threat actually is. As a result, the related taglines of the conference varied from “threat defense” and “threat protection” to “threat response” and “threat intelligence”. While organizations try to identify which threats pose the greatest risks, vendors are ready to provide various solutions
- Visibility. Although vendors offer different technologies that somehow provide visibility into hidden processes that occur across the IT environment, such as network monitoring and vulnerability assessment, we suggest the unified meaning of visibility an ability to provide comprehensive picture of who is doing what, where and when, and who is able to access what files across all critical systems and applications. Despite being a relatively new trend, it has a huge potential to become a synonym to IT security and inevitable part of organizations’ workflows.
- Security analytics. Apart from visibility across the network, it is extremely important to have technologies in place that allow to process large scale of data, as well as conduct thorough root cause and predictive analysis to develop an effective mechanism for decision-making. Many vendors increase effectiveness of their security analytics tools by adding real-time behavior analytics that helps gain deeper insight into what is going on in the IT infrastructure and minimize the risk of insider-caused data breaches.
- Machine learning. The overall excitement surrounding Big Data is gradually fading. Indeed, customers begin to realize that leveraging Big Data is hard without new cross-disciplinary approaches to cybersecurity. Machine learning is already becoming one of the core technologies to distill voluminous data into actionable intelligence and solve advanced security problems, such as identifying infected machines on the corporate network. Artificial intelligence can empower IT professionals in the fight against sophisticated adversaries by discovering patterns that can be used to compromise security and taking targeted defensive actions.
- Privacy. The Apple/FBI controversy raised one of the most debated issues during the event: the possibility of balancing security and privacy, and whether government intrusion is justified when it comes to extreme circumstances. In this context most of the professionals agreed that encryption is a key to providing end-to-end data protection, and weakening it for convenience of law enforcement would mean that culprits can also take advantage of it.
In the light of recent headline-making data breaches organizations more than ever have to adopt a comprehensive strategy that combines protective mechanisms with high-level analytics, threat intelligence and visibility to reduce overall vulnerability and ensure integrity of critical assets.
