It may be 5,000 miles away, but San Francisco’s RSA Conference arguably offers cybersecurity pros an unrivalled insight into where the market is heading.
Taking place this year from 6-9 May, the event pulls in around 45,000 people each year.
But what cyber technologies on show stood out for UK partners in attendance?
Lance Williams, CTO Distology
Hottest technology: Cyera/data security
“The coolest technology I saw, which isn’t new but is a new approach, is a company called Cyera. They find data in a fraction of the time of anything that’s ever been seen.
“Cyera comes along and has rolled out umpteen proof of concepts, has scored $450m in funding and takes six minutes to set up – 12 hours later you’ve got 25-30 TBs of data found and classified.
“So that was my ‘wow’ moment’.
“Over the next 12 months, as legislation drops, everyone will realise that all the data they’ve been piling into these large language models isn’t very secure, and being able to classify it and do something about it is really important. So Cyera’s arrival is super-important for that whole AI data security.
“On the back of that, my overriding sentiment is that data security in general is going to have a big resurgence. I think back ten years-plus and it was all about data. We’ve all gone Security Service Edge mad, and now everyone is harping on about AI, but data is going to have a new dawn. We need to find it and secure it.”
Dr Colin Williams, Chief Technologist – Networking, Security & Unified Communications, Computacenter
Hottest technology: Aembit
“There were a lot of interesting vendors and concepts. I did like the look of Aembit were the runner up in the RSA innovation sandbox. We’ve got to get digital identity to be the primary security control as it always should’ve been and elevate it from its historically administrative role.
“Aembit is focusing on digital identities at the heart of workload-to-workload communications which is a major element of our app centric world today. They are early stage so who knows what the future holds for them but the platform does look very interesting.”
Paul Starr, CEO of SEP2
Hottest technology: Reality Defender, Dropzone AI, Aembit
From LinkedIn post written during conference:
“The RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox was a fun morning filled with exciting technology. Reality Defender was especially intriguing with its exciting deepfake detecting tech. Meanwhile, Dropzone AI caught my attention with its SOC analyst complementary solution. However, I’m predicting that Aembit will take home the crown.”
And from a subsequent LinkedIn post at the event
“What are were my takeaways? I had initially planned to share insights about the intriguing new technology I encountered, but as I mentioned in my post two days ago, I’m somewhat disheartened by the overemphasis on ‘AI’.
“It seems every vendor is marketing their product as fully autonomous, capable of resolving all our problems, AI ‘silver-bullet’, which is far from reality. It was disconcerting to see ‘AI’ in every vendor’s strapline or name, regardless of their actual function, leading me to a sense of disillusionment.”
