The annual RSA Conference is one of the biggest events in the cybersecurity world. This year’s conference featured a ton of high-profile speakers and deep dives into topics ranging from threat hunting to employee awareness training. After attending many sessions and demos, and speaking to fellow conference attendees, I left with a few main takeaways.

Everything is going to the cloud

The cloud was the buzzword of RSA Conference 2022, with a majority of its booths touting cloud-based security management. This year’s show featured a number of companies offering cloud as a service and other companies providing tools to help customers implement their own cloud strategy. Cloud access security brokers (CASB) are very popular!

I was unable to find many significant differentiators between most services. Though the front runners seem to be NetSkope, Artic Fox, Forcepoint, and PAN — all of which have strong solutions.

Visibility is critical

One of the most important takeaways from RSA is that visibility is critical to security. It’s a lesson that has been reinforced time and again over the past decade, but it’s worth repeating: knowing what’s happening on your network is essential for keeping it secure.

While many organizations were slow to adopt automation—and even slower with AI—the market seems finally ready to buy in wholesale thanks to new services being offered by network management companies (many of which are cloud based).

These vendors are touting AI, for tracking users, applications, and attacks alike; they say this technology will provide deep insight into what’s happening inside your network without any human intervention whatsoever so you can stay ahead of threats as they emerge.

Password management for certain niches

As you may know, password management has become a hot topic in recent years. Several startups have emerged to offer password management applications for corporate users, and now the larger software companies are beginning to respond.

If you work in the financial services or health care markets, then this might be of interest to you. But it’s likely that most organizations will find other ways of managing passwords than using one of these products.

API integration is big

The integration of APIs into an enterprise’s applications is a good thing for the whole multiverse. This means that security, visibility, and management will all be intrinsic in an enterprise’s future custom applications, instead of just being an afterthought.

There were many companies offering integration tool kits, frameworks and/or services. While this is a highly beneficial step, I’m not sure how much outsourcing is necessary in order to implement sensible programming solutions.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this gives you a good summary of RSA 2022 and what you can expect to see in the near future in the cyber security industry.

In some areas like cloud and cloud security, things are moving very fast. In other fields like password management, things are not as exciting but still important. The key thing to remember when looking at these trends is that they all have one thing in common: they protect your data from being misused or stolen by attackers.