RSA Security Wrap Up

The year’s RSA security conference — as always — revealed the biggest trends in enterprise security. Lisa Phifer reports.

At last week’s RSA Conference, dozens of network hardware, software, and service providers exhibited wares and announced security offerings. Internet-borne crime, cloud service delivery, and compliance concerns continue to push network security onto center stage, forcing vendors to peer higher into the protocol stack and drill deeper into packets for greater visibility and control. In this roundup, we highlight a few announcements and demos that caught our attention at RSA 2011.

Cisco: Borderless Security Through Context Awareness

RSA is large enough to draw network infrastructure heavy hitters, from Cisco to Juniper, IBM to HP. For example, Security Techonology VP Tom Gillis used his keynote to offer a glimpse into Cisco Systems’ vision of the uber-connected future, where TrustSec-tagged traffic will enable appropriate handling, independent of location.

Dubbed SecureX, this framework represents an evolution of Cisco’s “borderless networks” strategy which continues to rely on embedded security – based not only on packet/flow source/destination but now also this newly-added “context” (when and where available). The idea of context-aware policy enforcement sounds promising. But yet another proprietary solution that can really only reap benefits once traffic enters a homogeneous network seems, well, bounded.

Read the rest about RSA conference at eSecurity Planet.