AI, Platforms, Zero Trust, and Other Topics That Dominated RSA Conference 2024

Every year there’s quite a bit happening at the RSA Conference and no matter how hard you try, it can be difficult to take it all in. Between a sprawling showfloor with hundreds of vendors vying for attention, speaking sessions with experts from across the industry, private meetings with customers and prospects, plus social events in the evening, it’s understandable that you can come away with a bit of sensory overload.

To get a better sense of the conversations that folks were having at RSAC, we’ve compiled a roundup of the hot topics and takeaways Netskopers had on their mind coming out of this year’s conference. Here’s some of what they had to say:

David Fairman, CIO & CSO, APAC: “The journey to generative AI and LLMs is currently in a similar place to where we were with cloud a decade ago, when business and technology teams were really pushing cloud, while security and risk teams were saying “Slow down, we need to figure out how to control this. We don’t understand it enough.” This is where we currently are with genAI. The takeaway for me is, let’s not repeat those same mistakes and instead ask how we can learn collectively from each other to get on the right foot a bit faster this time around.” 

Mike Anderson, Chief Digital & Information Officer: “The question that was asked to me all week was what we at Netskope are doing to secure generative AI. We’re providing guardrails for organizations so they can safely enable the use of genAI, which we’re uniquely qualified to do. The other question was about how we are embedding AI into our product. There, the answer is that we are using it to take friction out of the journey for people using the Netskope platform, whether they’re onboarding new applications or thinking about what policies they should implement.” 

Colin Estep, Principal Engineer, Netskope Threat Labs: “I was interested this year to hear that people seemed less interested in having a hybrid cloud environment, with a lot more people talking about how they have just one cloud platform they use and focus on. I found that surprising. Typically, in the past you heard people say they didn’t want vendor lock-in, but now I am seeing the opposite where people like having a platform that they know well, and feel comfortable using.” 

Francisca Segovia, Product Marketing Director: “What I heard a lot both from presenters on the show floor and in conversations I was having is that while security controls are important, performance needs to be an equally important consideration. We in the industry want to connect users to applications in a secure way, but if the performance isn’t great, people will find ways to bypass those security controls. To best enable these security controls, we need to establish the best connectivity possible between those users and the applications they’re trying to access. This means it needs to be simple, reliable, and fast. This was a heartening vindication of our approach here at Netskope!” 

Andy Horwitz, VP, Tech Alliances & Business Development: “What was interesting to me, and frankly a little surprising, is that I thought we would be talking about genAI all week long, but I really wasn’t. Based on the conversations I’ve been having, there’s been more focus on zero trust, which I think is quite interesting. From those conversations, there’s been a lot of focus on how Netskope works with cloud providers and what they’re doing with their security products. There’s also been a lot of interest from our partners about how they can best figure out Netskope inside their security ecosystem with a focus on zero trust and SASE.” 

Gerry Plaza, Field CTO: “I’ve noticed a real transformation in the kinds of conversation I am having here at RSA, which are increasingly focused on solving specific use cases. Companies are starting to become more mature with an awareness of what’s transforming their business and their needs when it comes to security with zero trust. In years past, lots of folks were asking “What exactly is zero trust?” and “How can I get started?”. But now the questions have become a lot more pointed saying “I know I have a problem and a risk. How can you help me solve that risk?”. That’s been a big change and a new trend.”  

Steve Riley, VP & Field CTO: “One thing I really liked that I saw this year was a renewed interest in some of what Netskope did in the very beginning, with folks asking about how they can improve their SaaS security. Additionally, a number of people were also interested in whether we have anything new coming with our CASB, and we do have some nice things coming soon that work the intelligence that we get with APIs, looking at what’s happening in SaaS apps and making the inline inspection even smarter.”