RSA Conference 2015 Wraps Up

And so it ends. This year’s RSA Conference has wrapped up.

The event brought tens of thousands of people to the Moscone Center in San Francisco to network and listen to discussions on everything from the marketplace for zero-days to securing the Internet of Things. As always, many people spent the bulk of their time on the show floor in the exhibitor area or in meetings. But this year’s RSA Conference also had more than 490 sessions and 700 speakers. Here are a few of the interesting sessions people may have missed.

• ‘Orchestrating Software Defined Networks to Disrupt the APT Kill Chain’

Symantec’s Sean Doherty and Deb Banerjee described the role software-defined networks can play in security by interfering with the various stages of the cyber kill chain. In a conversation with SecurityWeek, Doherty said that SDN can be used to easily change the rules and configuration of a network to improve security through micro-segmentation and service chaining.

• No More Snake Oil: Why InfoSec Needs Security Guarantees

White Hat Security’s Jeremiah Grossman challenged the security industry to start providing guarantees for customers in the event their products fail to prevent an attack or do what is advertised. Such guarantees, he said, can be used to separate vendors from the pack, and there are ways to measure performance data to ensure guarantees are being lived up to.

• ‘How Security can be the Next Force Multiplier in DevOps’ and ‘Continuous Security: 5 Ways DevOps Improves Security’

These two sessions were by Andrew Storms of New Context and the duo of David Mortman of Dell and Joshua Corman of Sonatype, respectively. The DevOps track was new to the RSA conference this year. According to Storms, if security teams and developers can come together, it represents a huge leap forward for their entire organization. Mortman meanwhile explained that through instrumentation, empathy, change management, reducing complexity and strong code testing, DevOps can improve security.

“I see DevOps as a philosophy that promotes understanding others’ needs and having an attitude of continuous improvement to drive business not only faster but more effectively,” Mortman told SecurityWeek.

Slides from the presentations at this year’s conference can be found here.