Over the past few days, I’ve had the privilege of being part of LogRhythm’s presence at the Infosecurity Europe 2018 conference. Our EMEA marketing team set up an amazing booth and lined up incredible conversations and speaking opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be part of a BrightTalk panel discussing how to protect your organization from ransomware. (I’ll save that recap for another blog!) As the conference ends, I’ve put together my top three takeaway messages from an amazing conference!
1. GDPR is everywhere: Not only is GDPR compliance directly impacting any business that works with EU citizens, it is affecting a wide range of other industries. Almost every booth at InfoSec had signs of GDPR, whether as a presentation topic, or simply indicators of the opt in nature for marketing communications. The floor buzzed with talk that ranged from how to be compliant to how to deal with non-EU-centric companies that are not compliant. There were even several conversations on how GDPR may change the playing field for cybersecurity in terms of identifying phishing and changing malicious usage of advertising networks. The consensus seems to be that even after a year’s worth of preparation, we are still in the infancy of understanding the full impact of the GDPR regulations. Learn more about GDPR compliance here.
2. Cloud is the future: Ready or not, cloud is coming, and it is changing the way we think about security. At InfoSec, cloud readiness, cloud security, and cloud operations were the second most common topic behind GDPR. As business-critical applications move to the cloud, the nature of security operations changes. Unfortunately, you can’t provide security by looking at foundational logs anymore, because you simply don’t have access! The proliferation of cloud-centered security and cloud operations products was extremely evident at the show. Many of the attendees were also talking about cloud — sometimes with excitement; sometimes with fear and trepidation. Whatever your level of “cloud maturity,” the message at the conference was clearly that the cloud is the future, and the future is coming fast!
3. Love Island? The most common non-security topic seemed to be reality television. When not talking about GDPR, cloud security, SIEM, ransomware, cryptojacking, IoT, machine learning, or the weather…many of the attendees seemed to be talking about the reality television show Love Island. If you are not familiar with UK reality TV, imagine something along the lines of The Bachelor/Bachelorette. To be fair, the topic mostly came up after the beers came out.
If you attended InfoSec, I hope you had a great show and took the chance to stop by our booth for a demo or conversation or some nifty LogRhythm swag. If you missed it, we hope to see you at Black Hat in Las Vegas or another show in the near future!