It is always interesting to see the entire security vendor community come together and parade their wares at RSA each year. If I put myself in the role of a potential customer, this week saw a dizzying array of vendors, many of whom were chasing the same industry buzzwords. The buzzwords of this conference, just based on my own observations, were:
- NAC – NAC continues to be a term lacking a comprehensive and agreed-upon definition. As a result, many vendors were claiming NAC support–often with a specific spin based on the capabilities of their company.
- Data Leakage – Companies attempting to protect data from being inadvertently disclosed were on the rise. It seems nearly impossible to prevent a dedicated adversary from disclosing data she has access to, but simple tagging mechanisms to prevent the accidental “reply-to-all” may be useful.
- Compliance – The Infosec equivalent of a trump card when it comes to purchasing decisions, it seemed almost every vendor touted help with regulatory compliance as a feature of their products.
- Policy – Another overused word (without qualifiers) many companies touted policy features.
I suppose this list of buzzwords means a single new startup, focused on all four areas, could probably get a nice batch of seed money from an unsuspecting venture capitalist. I can imagine the pitch now… “Our intuitive UI lets you craft complex policies to define data leakage protections correlated with the NAC status of an endpoint, all with rich ties to compliance reporting for export to an auditor.” I’m sure Vijay, the world’s most desperate venture capitalist, would jump on board.
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