Consolidation, Flexibility, ChatGPT, & Other Key Takeaways from Netskopers at RSA Conference 2023

At RSA Conference 2023, a number of Netskopers from across the organization who attended the event in San Francisco shared commentary on the trends, topics, and takeaways from this year’s conference.

Because there are so many activities happening during the conference, whether that’s keynotes, expert presentations, a sprawling showfloor spanning several buildings with hundreds of booths, countless executive meetings with partners and customers, or the many vendor social events, including even “fun runs”, it can be challenging to take it all in at once. With the conference now completed, here’s a collection of some of the Netskoper commentary to give you a glimpse of some of what took place during RSAC 2023, whether you attended or weren’t able to make it:

“The overarching theme, I think, is ‘stronger together.’ I had about 50 or 60 people who came by on the first day and pointed to the Gartner MQ and said ‘Congratulations! You’re in the SSE MQ all the way to the upper right. How does it feel to be a winner?” And my response to that is ‘Thank you, I feel very proud that we had that placement. While I appreciate the recognition, I think we’re all winners because there should only be one loser: and that’s the threats we’re defending against.” – Bob Gilbert, Chief Evangelist

“I think one of the number one topics for a lot of customers is how do I simplify, how do I converge, and how do I consolidate. And what they mean is ‘I have this perimeter, I’ve got separate boxes for the web, I do CASB and DLP, I want to move my capability in SD-WAN. How can I simplify this, converge, and modernize it.’ And that’s a lot of our discussions, around how they can do that and move to a SASE platform.” – Sanjay Beri, CEO & Founder

“One theme that came up for me out of our CISO Bootcamp session was, how can CISOs be more effective when reporting to their boards and how to make their story so compelling from a business perspective that business leaders want to support it. Another theme that emerged for me was how to build teams, how to build culture, and how to think about the CISO role in the context of the bigger, leader perspective.” – Shamla Naidoo, Head of Cloud Strategy & Innovation 

“I think the key takeaway is that we have to do a better job adjusting to change. Tech in general has to do that because it is so fast-paced but just geopolitically, as well as in the enterprise, we’ve had a lot of change over the past few years. Companies really need to rethink quickly how to adjust everything from their security operations to the security architecture to achieve.” – Jenko Hwong, Principal Engineer, Netskope Threat Labs

“I strongly believe that what customers need to focus on is two vectors happening within our security space: How do we improve and deliver security posture and deliver a more secure way of doing our business, but the other half of that equation is the network. Something I’ve heard from conversations is people talking about how ‘we need to enable connectivity or access, I need visibility.’ But what drives that connectivity, access, and visibility is the Network.” – Gerry Plaza, Field CTO 

“Not surprisingly, ChatGPT has been a part of every session. It’s an interesting topic because it reinforces how well we really set up our architecture. All it is, is just a different kind of threat. If we’ve done it right, it kinda falls in and we communicate to our staff our expectations. I’ve heard about people who just want to block it entirely, and folks that say they’re going to leave it open. Blocking it outright can also lead to its own problems. Like Jurassic Park taught us, ‘Life finds a way.’ Think about how you’re going to manage it and if you have told your staff what you expect. ” – James Christiansen, VP, Security Transformation

“The most common topic out on the show floor has been using AI and ChatGPT. That has been the number one topic going on in the background. I don’t think we’re going to get away from it, but how we shape that moving forward is going to be really important because as we start to load information into these data sources, how are they leveraging that to potentially attack us or security concerns with the data we upload into those systems.” – Damian Chung, Business Information Security Officer

“The trend I’ve heard a lot of is that we’re all too busy, we’ve all got too much work to do, and we have to work smarter, not harder. So there’s a big focus on making things actionable, cutting down on alert volumes, and making sure we only have to respond to what is absolutely needed and I really like that messaging.” – Ray Canzanese, Director of Netskope Threat Labs

“I have been so pleased spending hours and hours talking to customers who want to just continue to understand how we can help them with their business and their data and employees. This is my first year here at Netskope and I am just loving the customers, how they want to partner with us, and grow their security posture with products like ours.” – Ben Saitz, Chief Customer Officer

“Last year we saw a lot of talk about zero trust and every booth was plastered with SASE, SSE, CASB, and SWG, and you’re still seeing that stuff, but you’re seeing a lot more regular language, which is quite impressive and cool. I think it is really making sure that people are getting it. They’re coming here to solve business problems with technology, they’re not looking to solve technology problems with technology. As a solutions marketer that’s always felt like what we’re supposed to be doing and it feels like, as a collective, we’re finally getting there.” – Robert Arandjelovic, Director of Solutions Marketing

We’d also love to hear what your biggest takeaways from RSA Conference 2023 were too. Please connect with us on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and let us know what stuck out to you the most.