Trend Micro @ RSA 2012: Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I and many of my colleagues from Trend Micro attended the annual “RSA Conference” in San Francisco. Here are some highlights of what we saw and heard.

Cloud Security Alliance Summit

One important event for us was the “Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit 2012,” which was held at the recent “RSA Conference” in San Francisco. As part of this event, Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen received the first-ever CSA Industry Leadership Award. This highlighted the key role we played in helping decision makers consider the security implications of moving to the cloud. At the same time, it was also announced that the CSA would be expanded to include the APAC region, for which Trend Micro would set up a regional headquarters as a founding sponsor.

The summit also featured several important talks, some of which I listed below:

• Protecting State Secrets in the Cloud by former NSA director Mike McConnell. I found this to be a very timely talk considering that debates regarding the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 went on in the U.S. Congress a week or so before the “RSA Conference”.  The key takeaway from this talk was that governments now realize the national and global economic impact that targeted attacks and APTs make.
• Securing an OpenStack Cloud by Chris Kemp, former NASA CTO. He gave a technical presentation on OpenStack. OpenStack is, as the name implies, a project to build an open source cloud OS. I won’t talk about the details of the presentation too much, as it was fairly in-depth, but I do encourage readers to check out the presentation slides.
• Cloud Innovation—The Panel’s View on the Next Generation of Cloud Security Devices and Services. This panel discussion primarily focused on securing mobile devices and networks. The most interesting part of this discussion, however, had to do with the Trustworthy Internet Movement (TIM), announced by the moderator and Qualys CEO, Philippe Courtot. More information on the formation of TIM may be found here.

Innovation Sandbox

Another highlight of “RSA Conference” was the annual Innovation Sandbox Awards, in which 10 finalists vied for the Most Innovative Company Award. Appthority emerged as the clear winner with its Appthority Platform, which enterprise users can use to protect themselves against threats on mobile devices, including targeted attacks and data exfiltration.

CloudPassage, which aims to secure virtual servers in all kinds of cloud environments or structures, and Sumo Logic, which delivers a cloud-based service that can help enterprises automatically and efficiently spot security red flags in logs coming from plugged-in products across their perimeters, also piqued my interest.

In Part 2, I will share takeaways from other important talks, along with other observations.