By Katherine Walther | Trace3 Vice President of Innovation
RSA – or as someone cleverly put it, RS-AI – feels like it was larger than life, particularly on the main floor where security vendors continue to impress with their creative booth themes. Navigating the expo alone requires a comfortable pair of shoes, snacks, and a few bottles of water. While all of this was intoxicating, given that I am focused on innovative emerging technologies, my vision was set on the early-stage expo. The place where dreams are recently funded, new ideas are experiencing their market debuts, and the booths cannot distract you from the innovation.
Let’s go back to the AI theme. It was clear that in the early-stage expo, AI was the key theme. AI was on topics that you would not have seen AI on ever before. Data, Identity, Security Operations, API security, Supply Chain, and more. AI was the two letters you saw so much that by the time you got to the third row, the term became invisible.
My goal in the stroll was to find those vendors that we did not know yet, and more importantly, pick out the themes that these vendors are representing. Let’s break down a few of these themes:
Identity
Identity solutions were in abundance in the early-stage expo, pointing to two key thoughts: identity is this complicated and can the market support a widening identity ecosystem? These AI enabled identity solutions are tackling tough challenges ranging from analytics, privileged access, and resiliency. Giving much credence to the concepts of identity-first security strategies and identity threat detection and response. Many of these vendors seem to be aiming at solving the biggest challenge of all, which is data gathering. The timing could be spot on, given that identity is top of mind for the overwhelming majority of clients we speak to.
Security Operations
Really AI-powered security operations vendors were placed throughout the early-stage expo. Falling right in line with the enterprise shift to optimizing security operations, but also pointing to the fact that security vendors realize how necessary it is to leverage technology for managing the attack surface. Knowing that it takes AI to fight AI, emerging vendors are offering everything from refining the data pipeline, to actively triaging alerts and AI guided investigation and response. My belief is that we will see quick adoption in this theme of emerging solutions. They are looking to solve the now problems that security teams have been grappling with for years.
AI/ML Security
Timely topic, lots to prove out though. I expected to see more vendors representing this space given the swell in the market. Still there were enough to represent a theme. These solutions are seeking to identify and remediate risks across the use of all AI models. This market, while timely, is still an area that many enterprises are not yet focused on. We may see a bit of a lag in adoption.
Data Security & Privacy
No surprise here, if data is the new oil, then data security is the special forces protecting the oil. Add in the wake of data into cloud, it forces a paradigm shift for the way the enterprise views data security. There were some interesting and memorable vendors who are also solving data sharing security (I think I just made that up). Data security vendors have had a slower go in adoption than what this team originally had predicted, but perhaps with a renewed focus on the white space, we will see a quicker uptick.
Quantum
While not as many quantum security vendors as identity vendors, there were enough to be noticeable. Not just in quantum encryption either, but in secure networking as well. While quantum computing is not widely available yet, many organizations, particularly highly regulated organizations are asking questions on how to prepare for a quantum future.
While I didn’t hit on every single type of vendor in the early-stage expo, all 59 vendors created that draw, that excitement for the future. While we have already met many of them, we are excited to spend time with the few that we didn’t already know. I hope you found this RSA reflection to be helpful. As always, being a Trace3 client, you have insider access to our opinions on these solutions and more.
Katherine Walther is the VP of Innovation at Trace3, where she transforms enterprise IT challenges into innovative solutions. Dedicated to disseminating information about the future of technology to IT leaders across a wide variety of domains. Pairing a unique combination of real-world technology experience with insight from the world’s largest venture capital firms, her focus is to deliver market trends in the key areas impacting industry leading organizations. Based out of Scottsdale, Arizona Katherine leverages her 22 years of both tactical and strategic IT experience to help organizations’ transform leveraging emerging technologies.