RSA sets out its stall

RSA Security chief Art Coviello ploughed familiar territory in the opening keynote of this year's RSA Conference Europe event in London this morning.

In it, he reasserted the old chestnut that technology growth has outpaced human evolution, leaving us in the tricky position of trying to manage that technology and the security implications, effectively.

"Openness and information growth has combined with evolving threats to stoke the fires and raise temperatures to uncomfortable levels, and it will only get hotter as more new trends come our way," he argued.

"The challenge for the security industry is to enable the ubiquitous adoption of promising new technology and protect the information in what has become a boundaryless IT environment."

In a speech which frequently crossed that fine line between thought leadership and a sales pitch, it then fell to senior vice president Chris Young to set out RSA's seven guiding principles for building a systemic security strategy.

Security teams can neither resist technological innovation, nor allow new technologies to flourish without adequate controls, he maintained, but need to think about the following:

1) Embed security capabilities in the core IT infrastructure; for example, DLP in network devices

2) Develop an ecosystem of solutions

3) Design transparent and seamless systems

4) Ensure you have content aware and correlated technologies

5) Balance a perimeter-focused with an information-centric approach

6) Ensure security is dynamic and risk-based, because the criminals are certainly dynamic

7) Effective security needs to be self-learning and oriented to today's dynamic challenges.

We'll be reporting back from the conference over the next four days, so stay tuned for more.

20 Oct 2009