RSA went very well. It is an interesting trade show. It seems that the show has more vendors than customers. It is a great place to network with other vendors. For example, you can catch up on all your competitors (it is nice having them all in one spot.) That alone, makes the trip worthwhile. For this blog entry, I think I will keep it short and sweet and just highlight the three things that jumped out at me.
First, data protection was definitely an unofficial central theme. From solutions that do full disk encryption to solutions that offer policy based prevention of data leakage, the show had it all. I saw several interesting demos from companies like Verdasys and Utimaco. Of course, Symantec has its own solutions in this space but as I mentioned it is good to see what the other guys are doing.
Second, Network Access Control was not as prevalent as years past. I think there are a couple reasons for this. First, some of the smaller players have gone out of business or changed their names. Second, a lot of the leading endpoint security vendors (i.e. Symantec) have included NAC in their suites. These two items maybe related, maybe not.
Third, I was really interested in the area of whitelisting. One of the things Symantec did at the show is announce the latest Internet Security Threat Report. One of the key data points in that report is that Symantec identified over 500k new threats in the second half of last year. Keeping up with these threats while at the same time not heavily impacting the local system resources is the biggest challenge AV companies have right now. Because of this challenge, alternative ways to detect and prevent malware are key. I think whitelisting is one of these technologies that can help us. The key will be to make the impact of managing whitelisting to be equal to what it takes to manage AV today. One of the companies that I think is leading the way on this is Bit9.
As I said, overall, it was a great show. Lots of exciting things happening in the industry. Until next time.