It didn’t take a long study of the show floor at this year’s RSA conference to find that the security vendor community has left the big picture themes of security conferences of the past in the rear-view mirror. Clearly, there was no major new product category such as a NAC or a DLP or an IPS to wow the crowd into a ‘gotta have it’ mentality. Instead, most vendors built on their existing product base with refinements, integrations and consolidations.
While some may argue this shift from revolutionary to evolutionary progression is a sign of recessionary pressure on spending or a slow down in innovation, I actually see it as a good thing. It is some of the clearest evidence of the maturity of the market we’ve seen to date. Because, frankly, organizations are no longer looking for the next big thing to save them. Many practitioners and their organizations have finally realized that no new technology is going to swoop in and solve all of their problems. As a result, they’re forcing vendors to learn to approach problems from the people and process side of the house in order to deliver not just security products, but instead a comprehensive set of solutions.
This is what we saw this year, and what I expect to see in future conferences. It is a shift from a show floor full of vendors hawking disparate technology products, to a model where security companies are learning to gather up their tool sets and package them into a useable foundation for process change within the enterprise.
Moving from the exposition hall to the speakers’ podium, the programming at RSA expanded on this theme in its constant discussion of the fractured nature of information security at nearly every level. Art Coviello addressed it in his keynote on collaboration within the industry, acting White House cybersecurity head Melissa Hathaway touched on it in her discussion about private sector and government cooperation, and many more track speakers enlarged upon it during their discussions.
Many tracks this year were especially themed upon the way IT trends such as virtualization and cloud computing have sped up the process of blowing the fractured pieces of infrastructure to the wind and how security practitioners can track these pieces down and secure them without impeding the business. Because as difficult as technologies such as these have made our jobs, ultimately they do improve the way we do business.
On that note, I had our Lumension experts take to the RSA floor to provide insight into hot emerging trends and best practices. Take a listen and tell us what you think.
Bryan Fish on Buidling a Framework to Bridge Security-Compliance Gap.
Matt Mosher on Security in Sync: Cultivating a Culture of Collaboration.
Paul Zimski on Vulnerability Management: A Snapshot of an Ever-Changing Landscape.
Don Leatham on Ensuring Endpoint Integrity.
