RSA 2023 Is A Wrap

Keysight wrapped up it’s annual attendance at the RSA tradeshow last week.

While attendance still wasn’t back to pre-pandemic levels, the show was predicting that around 45,000 people would attend this year.

As expected, artificial intelligence (AI) was a notable topic of discussion.

Everyone’s interested to see what AI can do, especially in the area of cyber security. While ChatGPT has landed, I didn’t see any other areas when AI was going to make a significant impact this year. Even ChatGPT’s influence will be minor, in the security-context of things. ChatGPT’s main use case appears to be creating email content for phishing and spear phishing. Because of its usage, most targets of phishing attacks in the future will have a hard time of “just looking” at an email and being able to tell that it’s a phishing attack.

Another topic I noticed being talked about some was security for hybrid cloud environments – where a hybrid cloud is a mixture of a public (or private cloud) IT network and a physical on-premises IT network. As various studies are revealing, several (if not many) companies that moved a lot, or all, of their applications to the cloud are rolling pieces of that back to an on-premises environment. The simple reason is that not everything should have been moved to the cloud in the first place. While the cloud is great at spinning applications up and down, other factors have prevented many organizations from seeing the cost savings they expected. Performance and security problems also have entered the picture. In any case, security for hybrid cloud networks was a topic of interest that I noted — especially being able to encrypt and decrypt traffic backhauled from a cloud network to the on-prem network.