The RSA Conference last week was a milestone in more ways than one. We gathered that there were 45,000 attendees, an amazing record.

Judging by the number of booths, the crowd in each booth, the queue in all the restaurants around, no one could tell that there was a stock market mayhem going on and/or any remote hints of COVID anywhere. Most of the themes were the same old.. same old, but there were a few new ones:

1. Cyber Resilience – People have come to accept the pragmatic reality that 100% security is impossible. Hence the focus on Early Detection, Reducing Blast Radius and Forensics.
2. Cyber Insurance – This was a very new theme this year with innovations in quantifying and pricing risk.
3. Zero Trust – It was almost as if every vendor, whatever they were selling, added a preamble “Zero Trust” to their offering. No one product makes you zero trust, but rather an approach that implements “least privilege” products and processes together.
4. Private Cloud – Unlike past years, where there was a mad frenzy to move to the public cloud, practically all clients are taking a very methodical, measured and balanced approach of their investments in Private Cloud and Public Cloud.
5. CNAPP – Cloud Native Application Protection. Practically all large companies are consolidating their teams and infrastructure under a unified architecture integrating their CSPM (Cloud Posture Management), Vulnerability Management and CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection) into an overall CNAPP architecture.
6. DevSecOps – Practically every 3rd vendor had DevSecOps sprinkled in their banners and demos!Another positive news was 3 other terms (AI, IoT, Big Data) were barely found in the buzzword bingo in the vendor booths!

We elected not to have a booth but had a number of private “1 on 1” meetings at the W Hotel across the street. It was very productive, we got immense endorsement of our CNAPP platform, AccuKnox. Practically all aspects of what makes AccuKnox unique and differentiated was very well received:

1. Automated Least Privilege Policies to support Zero Trust Architecture
2. Support for modern (Kubernetes) and legacy (virtual machine) workloads
3. Support for private and public cloud
4. Open Source led approach

We are very pleased with the reception we got. It was wonderful to see folks at RSA who were persevering through the COVID or Stock Market meltdown blues. We look forward to a great year ahead till we get ready for RSA 2023!