It's Visibly Clear from the RSA Conference 2015

Everyone is looking for more visibility
at the RSA Conference, even the FBI's
Fido! 

Everyone at this year’s RSA Conference was speaking the same language of needing and providing more operational visibility. Even the weather seemed to agree with the visibility discussion as the clouds cleared away each afternoon. 

At VSS Monitoring, our mission has always been centered on delivering total network visibility to optimize the effectiveness of your security and network monitoring tools. InfoSec professionals around the world rely on VSS to give their monitoring and security tools access and visibility to traffic across networks without requiring physical reconfiguration. We’ll talk more about that later. Right now, let’s focus on our top takeaways from this year’s RSA conference.

                                                                                                                

Moving security tools in line is a key step
for many attendees

Get in line 

The rate that new malware is being introduced into corporate networks is leaving no choice but to place security tools inline. That is clear. We heard from many attendees that bringing their security tools inline was critical. For some, this will be a first and concerns surrounding using SPAN ports, and not disrupting the network, were top of mind issues to be solved in 2015.

Sandboxes provide a safe
environment to analyze
malware

Sandboxes are Popular

For others, sandboxing is viewed as the next step towards getting ahead of emerging attack vectors. Combining endpoint security with a secure sandbox environment to further analyze unknown files and malware is a popular deployment scenario we discussed. In this scenario, attendees were interested in learning how they could direct traffic to multiple tools while also accommodating behavioral sandboxing. We spoke with many attendees that needed a safe environment to isolate, analyze and ultimately address malware in a contained environment. 

RSA attendees are focused on
closing the loop for security analysis

Creating Closed Loops

Another way attendees are responding to the problem of unknown malware is with cloud-based threat monitoring and intelligence services. Attendees were keen to integrate cloud-based threat intelligence feeds and architect a closed monitoring loop, using on-premise appliances as well as and cloud-based services. We had several discussions on different ways traffic could be directed through their tool chain and then forwarded out to a cloud based security services for analysis.

While security tools will always be the darlings of the RSA Conference, we spoke to a number of people who were not planning to deploy any new tools in 2015. Instead these attendees wanted to focus on how they could collect, analyze and direct the right data in real-time to the existing tools. A truly refreshing thought. 

It was good to see that the industry is quickly growing-up and changing. Sound decisions regarding security architecture and how everything (and everyone) needs to play together well for effective security was a welcome thought. 

Learn 10 Tips to Mature your Security Strategy