Cybersecurity Buzz Phrase Bingo
The RSA Conference expo was chock full of vendors showing off their wares with language as colorful as the blinky lights on a SOC dashboard.
April 24, 2018
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Adaptive Security
This is a new modifier for anything that doesn't depend heavily on traditional signature-based technology. Except for those adaptive products that do sometimes.
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Cloud-Native
Security SaaS without those 'blinky pizza boxes' is the pitch for cloud-native. This is a good twofer - it promotes cloud architecture while giving a sly backhand to old-school competitors that started in the days when on-prem devices were the only option.
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Hardened Anything
It's not good enough to simply say something is encrypted. Hardened sounds much more effective. This one also has been used interchangeably with patching and configuration management.
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Button-Push Automation
When a security automation vendor yearns to use the Staples easy button gimmick but realizes the copyright laws wouldn't look favorably, the term "button-push automation" comes to the rescue. Of course, according to a few SOC analysts at the show, the trick for buyers sometimes is figuring out how many times you've got to push that button to achieve the automation you want.
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Single Pane of Glass
Visibility was a close second behind automation as the single-most-uttered descriptive noun at the show. It's not good enough to gather security information: you've also got to make it visible to analysts, CISOs, executives, and so on. And one of the preferred methods of doing that is by providing a "single pane of glass" into that information - a.k.a. a security dashboard.
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Blast Radius
A way cooler way to refer to attack or breach impact. This term is starting to gain a ton of traction with marketers, who stole it from their most colorful security researchers. CISOs no longer mitigate risk. They minimize the blast radius of security incidents.
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AI-Based Anything
It seems that every security product that makes use of algorithms in any way whatsoever is now equipped with advanced artificial intelligence. The next-gen of any security product category most assuredly includes AI.
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Orchestration
We saw security policy orchestration, automation orchestration, alert and response orchestration, and key orchestration, among others. Orchestration is Automation 2.0 - in other words, automation with better APIs.
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Blockchain-Enabled
Step one: Embed blockchain in security platform. Step two: ??? Step three: Profit. Blockchain-enabled security boasts blockchain as the new, new way of using cryptography and cryptographic ledgers to authenticate users, ensure data integrity, and protect network devices in the indeterminate future.
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Zero-Trust
See also: borderless enterprise perimeter is dead, and identity-based security. Same song, different verse. And an apparent comeback for the concept and term, which Forrester Research first coined nearly eight years ago.
Image Source: Adobe Stock (coachwood)
Zero-Trust
See also: borderless enterprise perimeter is dead, and identity-based security. Same song, different verse. And an apparent comeback for the concept and term, which Forrester Research first coined nearly eight years ago.
Image Source: Adobe Stock (coachwood)
With close to 700 vendors exhibiting at RSA Conference last week, the show floor was big enough for just about any Alice or Bob to hit their daily steps milestone faster than you can say "Would you like to see our demo?"
The expo was a smorgasbord of cybersecurity defense and automation tools, with plenty of cool new technology in the mix. But the sheer scale of the vendor list and the amount of marketing dollars at play were such that the noise level was amped up to "11" this year.
The following were some of our favorite recurring buzz phrases used around on the show floor, along with a few helpful definitions to cut through the marketing-ese. If you hit BINGO with these terms while listening to sales pitches at the RSA Conference or any other recent shows, let us know in the comments, and feel free to share any other such lingo you've heard lately.
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