The annual RSA Conference was held last February at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and attracted more than 700 speakers, 650 exhibitors, and 36,000 attendees, including executives from SecurityScorecard. We were all unified by the theme of the Human Element in cybersecurity.
There was a wealth of information to digest and SecurityScorecard continues to reflect on all that we learned.
One of the keynote speakers we found to be the most intriguing at the conference was Ken Xie, Founder, Chairman of the Board, and CEO of Fortinet, a multinational corporation that develops cybersecurity software and appliances, including firewalls, endpoint security, and intrusion prevention.
Here are three takeaways he predicts that will impact your organization, while he spoke back in February, these trends are still applicable throughout the year and beyond.
1. Perimeter network security expansion and performance is critical
According to Xie, digital innovation is the primary driver behind increased cyber attacks. As the digital perimeters continue to expand, billions of “security edges” are formed, leading to more cyber threats.
Since the 1990s and first generation connection firewalls, organizations have built “walls” around themselves and leveraged network perimeters as the first line of defense to protect companies from outside threats. But as these perimeters continue to grow and workspaces become more fluid, protecting your network from the outside may not be enough. It’s now time to rethink perimeter-based security models and address the entire infrastructure, including internal networks. Not only do traditional perimeter need protection, but every facet of your organization, including its WAN and access edges, IoT, 5G, and LAN.
Creating faster and more secure networks is critical in order for companies to protect their sensitive data from the inside out. Security-driven networking will unify both networking and security to deal with bad content, applications, users, devices, and where the traffic is coming from in order to help organizations take the appropriate steps to respond properly.
2. Pay special attention both to the edge and the cloud
In just 10 years, technology has shifted from simple PCS and servers to mobile devices and clouds. This transition has created brand new risks, including poor access control, shared tendency, and supply chain vulnerabilities.
In the coming few years, the edge and immersive technologies will “eat the cloud.” Ninety-eight percent of data is generated on the edge and not the cloud and 80 percent of this data will never travel from the edge to the cloud. This leads to organizations to having to fully protect not just their cloud and datacenter, but also the edge. This is why it is crucial that an enterprise protects its whole data infrastructure.
One issue with this is that network safety protocol has not changed in over 40 years, despite speed increasing by over one-million percent. Additionally, network security continues to add applications, fiercely taxing computer resources. With all of this new data and lack of computing power, how can your company close the gap to protect itself?
The answer is investing in acceleration beyond a general purpose CPU with a dedicated chip to boost computing power.
3. The industry is consolidating
Xie pointed out that only three vendors account for 50 percent of the security appliances used by organizations. A decade ago, the top four vendors in network security accounted for 40 percent of the total market while today, these same vendors make up 60 percent of the total space. The industry as a whole is consolidating to fewer platform vendors that can integrate and automate a robust spectrum of infrastructures and multiple security sectors.
We were excited to be part of this innovative conference and share what we learned with our clients. In order for your business to have the comprehensive security it needs in these changing times, it should invest in SecurityScorecard. We allow you to monitor your data externally. Our comprehensive platform alerts you to problems as they appear and automatically generates a recommended action plan so that you can always stay one step ahead cyber threats.
