Last week, ReliaQuest team members traveled to San Francisco to meet with enterprise security leaders and industry experts during the RSA 2020 Security Conference. Even with a few significant drop-outs due to Coronavirus concerns, vendors continued to fill every nook and cranny – across the north, south, and west halls. ReliaQuest took a different approach, securing a nearby venue that allowed for comfortable, focused, and productive conversations. After a busy week meeting with customers, prospects, industry analysts, and press, these are the top trends we noticed during RSA conference week this year:

The Theme: “More of the Same”

In previous years, there have been apparent themes consistently repeated across the industry – such as behavioral analytics, automation, and cloud security. This year, the best description we’d use to capture the theme comes from an industry analyst our team met with: “more of the same”.

What do we mean by this? When looking across the crowded vendor floor, it became clear that the number of exhibitors in the RSA conference expo hall mirrored the explosion of tools in the security industry and the growth of tools used by enterprises. From network security to email security, user security, even social media security… every imaginable challenge had its own tools. In another meeting, one industry analyst stated that his firm is aware of upwards of 3,500 vendors in the security space. Just like the physical space at RSA, the security tool space is over-crowded and enterprises were struggling to sift through the noise.

Too Many Tools, Too Little Value – And An Open Door to Risk

Each specialized tool claimed to support either a piece of threat prevention or detection and response for distinct attack surfaces and environments. Add them up, however, and it’s more than any one enterprise can effectively utilize. Enterprise security teams reinforced to us that the time they spent managing, tuning, and troubleshooting each tool took away from time using each tool for its original purpose.  According to ReliaQuest’s Technology Sprawl Survey, 69% of security decision-makers report their security team spends more time managing security tools than effectively defending against threats.

Not only is this approach not sustainable, it introduces unintended risk, such as misconfigured controls that create blind spots, or over confidence the enterprise is prepared to detect threat types when the tools are not fully utilized.

A Need for a Different, More Effective Approach to Cyber Assurance

That brings us to the third theme of RSA – an important one for ReliaQuest. As tools multiply and environments evolve, how do security leaders know their controls will work as expected when an attack occurs? That’s where our announcement of integrated attack simulations into GreyMatter came in. Four months after the acquisition of Threatcare, GreyMatter now offers enterprises a turnkey approach to cyber assurance through continuous attack simulations across on premise and multi-cloud environments.

The industry often thinks of automation only in terms of remediation plays. But ReliaQuest looks for opportunities to automate across the cyber response lifecycle. ReliaQuest’s security operations platform, GreyMatter aggregates, de-dupes and enriches alerts from across your security ecosystem to serve up a research package, providing analysts with all of the information they need, in one place, to detect, investigate, respond and automate.

Contact us to learn more about the ReliaQuest GreyMatter Platform.

ReliaQuest GreyMatter, the first SaaS security platform, delivers security confidence. ReliaQuest helps organizations gain greater visibility across SIEM, EDR, multi-cloud and hybrid environments—regardless of vendor or data location–to speed detection and response, and leverage validated content and benchmarking to continuously improve the effectiveness of all their security investments.