RSA 2013 ends and I both miss it and breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over. Let me explain. As a security guy, it’s nice to be around other security like-minded people. We all speak the language. You needn’t really justify why you are worried about things most people have never heard of. It’s exciting to see so many people try so many different things, be it startups, big companies, or inspired individuals. It’s great to see government employees, corporate executives, and pony-tailed security geeks all talking to one another. In a slightly strange way, it’s therapeutic.
That said, RSA is an incredibly intense week, and this year’s conference was no exception. In four-and-a-half full days (and this is just my schedule), I had:
Eight customer meetings
Eight dinners (working out to 1.78 dinners per day.)
Four press interviews: two on-record, one background, 1 live videocast via Google+
Four bizdev/company review meetings
Two panels
Two analyst interviews
Two partner meetings
One customer breakfast talk along with with Chris Young
And this doesn’t include the countless run-ins with friends, a quick word here or there, and emails that all have to be managed along the way. In some respects, you don’t get enough time with really good friends (if there really is such a thing as enough time for such people in our lives), and in the end, it’s a huge blur from meeting to meeting.
I posed a question in my blog earlier this year: Are we making progress in cyber security? I say yes, yet not nearly enough, and now I am thinking hard about how to change it before RSA 2014.
Mobility and application access capabilities have encouraged many of today’s work patterns. Some work behaviors were recently noted in a Cisco-commissioned research report on mobility and BYOD comparing IT and end user viewpoints. Striking about the findings is that day-to-day business activities were relatively balanced on wired and wireless connections—so while mobility is here and growing, usage is no more than wired. Core to the findings were end users’ view that mobile devices are 37% less effective than their corporate laptop for conducting business activities. From an IT perspective, managing devices and multiple policies in a wired and wireless environment was a key challenge. Mobile device usage behaviors surveyed suggested a personal and social flair. The predominant applications used on mobile devices are not specific business applications (22%) but collaborative applications (56%). The report also indicates that mobile devices are used for personal use more frequently than IT estimates. Read More »
We are in the middle of several major market trends and transitions, including mobility, cloud and virtualization. Security is at the center of these massive transitions, and our customers tell us that they want simplicity and seamlessly integrated solutions for their network architectures. These industry disruptions require new thinking to create innovative technological solutions that will solve our customers’ biggest problems.
Enter Bret Hartman.
Bret has joined Cisco as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Security Technology Group, which encompasses all of Cisco’s core security products. For Cisco, Bret will define our overall security technology strategy, particularly as it relates to how security technology integrates across the network infrastructure. Ensuring that our strategy transitions into value-added customer solutions will be critical as we move to an integrated security architecture that leverages the network.
View this video blog to see and hear Cisco CSO John N. Stewart reflect on the recently completed RSA 2012 in which John shares his thoughts and perspective on this year’s edition of the busy security conference:
As I look back on this past week’s RSA 2012 in San Francisco, I’ve had the opportunity to speak to many enterprise and service provider customers, channel partners, analysts, media (including Fox Business News), investors, and even some of our competitors. BYOD, the transition from physical to virtual to cloud, and IPv4 moving to IPv6 networks came up over and over again. Read More »
