One of Europe’s biggest cyber security conferences, Infosecurity Europe 2013 has been making waves over the past two days and is rounding-up today. The exhibition floor was packed and eventful, indicative of a flourishing IT security market. There is no denying that cyber security has gained visibility in the past few years, with high-profile hacking and cyber-espionage repeatedly making the news. This is a boon for security vendors, and has prompted a growth in offerings targeting all the newest IT trends, including cloud-based services and mobile devices, apps and networks. These developments are not the only drivers of the security market; there is growing concern about data security, compliance and upcoming regulation resulting from national and regional cyber security strategies.
Certainly the latest offerings have centered on ensuring compliance in a world where data is continuously on the move and being increasingly sent outside of the organizational network. Whether this is via the cloud or on smartphones, data now moves and resides quite often beyond the corporate perimeter. The focus has been to offer a secure way of leveraging these new ways of doing business while retaining full control over the process. This is not an easy feat for many organizations: they need to understand the risks, justify investment and anticipate for the long-term. This requires formulating strategies that will hold out alongside the technology and the evolving nature of threats.
Certainly network security, whether hardware-based or virtualized, still featured prominently at the conference, with a number of vendors pushing some dynamic and highly competitive product offerings: F5, Infoblox, Stonesoft, Arbor Networks and ManageEngine. The mot d’ordre here was securing the DNS against DDoS, but there was also increased attention to scalable and elastic network management.
In terms of the cloud, vendors are coming at it from two different angles: cloud-based security as a service and securing existing cloud services. In the former category, companies such as Bit9 and Catbird are offering an interesting approach with their own solutions built from the ground up. For the latter, CipherCloud and Ping Identity have some innovative offerings that can be added on to existing processes.
From a data security perspective, Varonis, Integralis and Thales offer compelling platforms for information governance, compliance and key management, including consulting and auditing services.
Much lower on the agenda was mobile fraud and revenue protection on the carrier backbone. A niche vendor in this area is Revector, a UK based company which received two Queen’s awards in 2012 for enterprise innovation.