Quick Takeaways from RSA Conference 2022

With RSA Conference 2022 now in the rearview mirror, while it is all still fresh, it’s a good time to reflect on what happened at this year’s conference. 

We had a number of Netskope folks from across teams out in full force at RSA, whether presenting at the conference, staffing our booth, or exploring the show floor to see what everyone else is doing. This was the first year RSA has been back in person since 2020, so there are likely a lot of folks who still couldn’t make it this time around.

With that in mind, we surveyed a number of Netskopers to give us some quick thoughts and hot takes on some of the biggest trends they saw at RSA Conference 2022. Here’s what they had to say:

Zero trust mania

The most common takeaway Netskopers came away with from RSA Conference 2020 is that zero trust is the term on every vendor’s mind.

“Everyone has a zero trust product, which is confusing to buyers. 80% of companies currently have a zero trust program or strategy underway.”

-Mike Anderson, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Netskope

“The hype on the expo floor reminded me of a few years ago when threat intelligence was all the rage. It seemed like every vendor rebranded themselves as “threat intelligence.” This year it was “zero trust.” No matter what service their product provides, they all say they are zero trust. And like with threat intelligence, in a few years we will see who truly provides a zero trust solution. There is a great deal of confusion of what constitutes a zero trust solution and we need to keep up our efforts to educate the market.”

-James Christiansen, CSO VP, Cloud Security Transformation

“You know zero trust is a sticky marketing term when security awareness vendors call themselves a zero trust solution. Every security leader is on a zero trust journey or about to embark on one, and Netskope is an essential component of that journey, whether they know it now or find out in the near future.”

-Shamla Naidoo, CISO, Head of Cloud Strategy at Netskope

As Mike, James, and Shamla all point out, this rise in awareness and confusion around zero trust also offers a great opportunity to better educate the market about zero trust and how it relates to a solution like zero trust network access (ZTNA), and more broadly to security service edge (SSE) capabilities.

Eyes toward the future

While zero trust dominated many of the conversations this year, there were a number of other future-looking topics to be found at RSA 2022. Here are some of the next big cybersecurity topics Netskopers saw on the horizon:

“I saw only two exhibitors who were touting forms of API security controls, which will become increasingly necessary as cloud applications interact directly with each other (i.e., not through a user session).”

-Steve Riley, Field CTO

“As COVID-19 cases simmer down and an increasing part of the workforce goes back into the office, the focus of CISOs is shifting from remote workers to the need to protect data in a hybrid world.”

–Bob Gilbert, VP GTM Strategy and Chief Evangelist

“Abstracted security is the key to speed. Security that is proprietary and/or embedded in applications, systems, or data cannot adapt quickly.”

-Shamla Naidoo, CISO, Head of Cloud Strategy at Netskope

RSA is such a huge conference and it can be overwhelming to try and take it all in. If you want to hear more in-depth thoughts from the conference, here’s a recap video featuring a conversation with Steve Riley and Netskope Product Marketing Director Brian Tokuyoshi. 

We’d also love to hear what your biggest takeaways from RSA Conference 2022 were too. Please connect with us on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and let us know what stuck out to you the most.