As I walked the floor in South Hall at RSA 2020, I realized my attendance this year would mark 10+ visits to the Moscone Center in San Francisco for one of my favorite shows of the year and I reflected on how this year was different, and what had remained the same. As someone who has worked in enterprise security for the majority of my career, I often think about some of my friends and colleagues who work on the front lines: security administrators, SOC analysts and CISOs to name a few. In fact, this year’s theme of “The Human Element” surely brought some of these thoughts to the forefront for many of the attendees at the show. With hundreds of technologies and many more vendors, how do the humans in the room cut through the noise to make meaningful decisions regarding security?
The short answer: Technology needs to fit into a greater plan around people and process. Where are the gaps in my security controls? What are the skill gaps on my team? How will this technology make my job easier and free up resources? How do I operationalize and measure these initiatives? Without answering these questions, the overwhelming number of vendors, technologies and products at RSA can be a little overwhelming.
This year at RSA, we showcased security technologies across Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In fact, HPE/Aruba is one of the few vendors that has built security into many facets of the infrastructure, allowing our customers to implement security best practices with a limited amount of incremental resources. On the server side, we showcased HPE server infrastructure security solutions that ensure integrity down to the actual silicon and firmware. On the Aruba side, we highlighted some of our capabilities across IoT, network and branch security. From the beginning, Aruba has leaned forward on network security by embedding intrusion prevention capabilities directly into our wireless access points and ensuring our products use the latest encryption standards such as WPA3. HPE/Aruba embedded security capabilities and their ability to reduce cyber risk were recently validated through the attainment of the Cyber Catalyst designation by global insurance and risk management leader Marsh.
Dramatic shifts in networking and connectivity such as the full-scale adoption of IoT have created major opportunities and challenges for our customers. IoT has dramatically grown the attack surface that today’s organizations are working to manage, and sophisticated attacks have made methodologies such as Zero Trust important focal points within broader security strategies.
Aruba’s philosophy of embedding security into the operational fabric of an organization is a good example of balancing technology advancements with the human factor. Helping our customers deal with macro trends such as IoT, as well as embrace approaches such as Zero Trust are critical to our mission as a company. Aruba solutions such as ClearPass provide full-spectrum visibility into devices connecting to the network, but also automatically apply proper security controls such as authentication and micro segmentation. This level of integration gives networking and security teams inherently more secure infrastructure from the start and allows them to operationalize best practices. It also helps our clients strike a balance between cutting edge technologies, security aspirations and the human component within their organization.
As we look into 2020, our ability as security professionals to utilize cutting edge security technology and effectively integrate that technology with our people and processes will dictate our success. As part of the Aruba team, we are laser focused on this task, and I look forward to helping our customers balance these priorities as they evolve their security approach into 2020 and beyond.
