Another year, another great RSA Conference. This year, Tufin’s presence at the show was bigger than ever before. With exciting pre-show announcements, on-site speaking sessions, and guest speakers at our booth, we brought our A game to a new level.
Prior to the show, Tufin made two major announcements.
On April 5, we announced the Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program and welcomed inaugural members Cybereason, Cyber Observer, DFLabs, Reposify, and Swimlane. The new program extends the capabilities of the Tufin Orchestration Suite to make the platform more accessible with Tufin’s REST APIs, opening a new avenue to meet customer demand. With the addition of these new members, Tufin Orchestration Suite will initially address four new critical use cases: Security Incident Enrichment, Security Incident Response, Compliance, and Risk Assessment.
RSA was a great opportunity for us to get the word out about the TAP program, and we were excited to welcome these partners to the Tufin booth to give presentations on our respective integrations and provide short demos of our joint capabilities.
But we didn’t stop there. On April 10, Tufin announced its latest product offering, Tufin Orca, a cloud-based solution that enables users to extend Tufin’s policy-based approach to secure containers and microservices. The solution integrates with DevOps teams’ CI/CD tools to scan for threats, secure containers, and comply with regulations.
There was a great deal of interest in Tufin Orca from RSA attendees, and we’re adding new members to the product’s early access program daily.
Speaking of DevOps, the Tufin Orca team was busy at the DevOps Connect Conference the day before RSA officially kicked-off, and Tufin CTO Reuven Harrison participated in a panel discussion “DevSecOps: The Road to Better, Faster, Stronger” hosted by DevOps.com.
This marked the fourth year of DevOps Connect, which has grown rapidly since its first event. Tufin’s Colby Dyess, director of cloud marketing, believes the reason for its growth is twofold:
The importance of DevOps within businesses
DevOps teams leverage agile patterns and automation to continuously deliver new applications that address shifting business needs. Organizations who have yet to adopt DevOps find themselves struggling to keep pace and risk being disrupted by more nimble competitors. However, while DevOps teams have streamlined development, resource provisioning and application deployment, they have not incorporated important security and compliance practices most businesses require.
The emergence of DevSecOps – which is essentially the blending of DevOps and security teams
It is still early days for the DevSecOps movement and forward-thinking professionals come to these events to collaborate on how to make security an integral (and automated!) facet of DevOps practices and tool chains.
The theme of RSA this year was “now matters.” Looking at this theme from a Tufin perspective, it’s no surprise. The idea of speed and immediacy with regard to security and business demands is at the root of what Tufin does. To us, it’s the idea that security automation enables organizations to be more agile and keep up with the speed of business while maintaining a strong security posture. Based on this year’s RSA theme, it appears that the industry is waking up to the fact that putting an automation strategy in place now is pivotal.
What are some other themes that came up during the week and how might they impact the future of security? We asked our experts at Tufin:
Based on my conversations, I’d say putting security data to purposeful use was a key theme at RSA. There were many companies that detect threats or report on various security incidents and then consolidate this data for better visibility, but the result is too much data and too little response. While there are a lot of security data solutions out there, the ability to purposefully and consistently drive action within security operations resonated the most – take data and act on it rather than just having it on hand.
–Dan Rheault, Senior Product Marketing Manager
I saw an almost abandonment of active detection technology, as well as the corresponding vendors. Instead, there was a much stronger focus on containment (orchestration) and proactive assessment (scanning, DLP, etc.). People may have finally given up the idea that they are immune, and we’re now seeing the market respond to this. If you “assume you will be compromised” then proactive measures to contain the attack takes priority over where the attack originates and how it was executed.
I saw a lot of orchestration, but not a lot of automation. Automation, the “make it work” part, is the real challenge. There’s a misconception that orchestration imputes automation. We’re seeing the market for generic task orchestration gaining traction; however, the actions of these systems require automation. Currently, these tasks are subbed out to a very diffuse marketplace making standard integration and feature parity impossible.
–Joe Schreiber, Technical Director of Business Development
Personally, I was surprised by how many security professionals with no experience in DevOps, containers or even cloud stopped by to learn about Tufin Orca. I believe this represents a growing awareness of DevOps and a recognition by security professionals that DevOps is here to stay – that they, the security professionals, both need and want to work with DevOps teams to implement security practices.
While some write about the conflict between security and DevOps teams, what I found was that many security leaders want help supporting, rather than stopping, DevOps teams. Many security leaders confided that their current security tools and best practices aren’t well suited to the agile and automated methods of modern DevOps teams. So, our message about how Tufin Orca acts as a bridge between security and DevOps resonated well with them.
–Colby Dyess, Director of Cloud Marketing
While the industry might be winding down from a busy week at RSA Conference, there is still work to be done. Be on the lookout as we have more product news up our sleeves that will address some of the most pressing issues that were highlighted at the show.
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