Observations from RSA 2014

We are now back home after a great week at the RSA Conference across the bay in San Francisco.  We had some great client meetings and enjoyed catching up with our friends in the industry.

Here are a few observations and notes we’d like to share:

• The event doubled the size of the location from last year and is rumored to have had over 80,000 attendees.  We certainly experienced an increase in traffic at our booth demo.
• This year we had demo stations set up in the Intel Security booth. We demonstrated the Intelligent Network Platform’s ability to scale Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) intelligence within a virtual network. Check out the video. We also showed how by combining with the Intel communications chipset 89xx we can increase data center security and speed.
• Obviously security was a key theme at this conference. To illustrate, we saw a presence from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the NSA – which makes sense as we hear of increased focus and funding on cyber security.
• Another key theme common among all security vendors is the movement toward a hybrid of physical and virtual appliances.  Security vendors still develop and ship physical appliances often with hardware accelerators.  In contrast, virtual appliances may run on general purpose hardware with no guarantee the hardware accelerators will be present in the cloud.  This means all aspects of the virtual function may run in software.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by and we’ll see you again next year if not sooner.

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