Aviatrix Blog 
Last week, I represented Aviatrix at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, a first for me but hopefully not the last.
If you know us, you’ll know that unlike many other exhibitors at the show Aviatrix is not a typical cybersecurity company. However, we’ve seen a long-building convergence between networking and security in the cloud and believe in the power of those these roles working and communicating effectively. Furthermore, there’s a growing need for “east/west” axis protection (between private applications) in order to round out the zero trust network access (ZTNA) picture.
During RSAC, I and my expert colleagues had a chance to discuss these and other trends gaining visibility at the executive level. These conversations and insights revealed some interesting ways that businesses are working to a competitive advantage through their infrastructure investments that are worth highlighting.
Aviatrix and Industry Analysts Talk Trends
Throughout the conference, our CEO Doug Merritt and VP of Product Chris McHenry had a chance to sit down with several leading industry analysts to discuss trends and their observations from the show.
- Doug and Chris met with theCUBE host Dave Vellante to discuss how cloud networking is joining with secops – why now, and what this evolution means for businesses. View full video here.
- John Grady, Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, hosted Doug in a fireside chat where they looked at findings from the 2024 Secure Cloud Networking Field Report and how escalating outages are strongly driving the unity between cloud networking and cloud security. View the chat here.
- Chris talked cloud security with President of Cybersphere Shira Rubinoff of The Futurum Group (Six Five Media). Watch the video here.
Security Challenges Aren’t Confined to Security Titles
During the event, I had in-depth conversations with cybersecurity experts from various sectors, revealing several universal challenges in the industry.
- Visibility is paramount in cybersecurity. It’s more practical to detect attacks than to solely focus on prevention, as this approach can significantly reduce the damage. The cyclical nature of cybersecurity means that focusing all efforts on prevention can be futile—the key lies in identifying attacks early to minimize their impact.
- Aggregation and correlation of data are essential. Having visibility is one thing; making it actionable is another. The industry has long faced the challenge of turning security logs into useful, prioritized insights. There’s a demand for solutions that can efficiently analyze and correlate data from multiple sources.
- Defense in depth remains the gold standard for securing applications, workloads, and their connecting networks. Each requires a tailored approach: applications need protection against software supply chain attacks and bugs, workloads need runtime visibility and the ability to isolate compromised processes, and networks need comprehensive visibility, unified policy enforcement, and flexibility.
- Distributed security in the cloud is the way forward. Historically, security was centralized due to the complexity of managing policies across various network points. The cloud changes this dynamic, enabling policies to be intelligently enforced across the entire network. Aviatrix has been at the forefront of this shift towards distributed security, advocating for a uniform policy approach across all cloud environments. Our presence and discussions at RSA validate our leadership and strategic direction in this area.
- Freedom is more than a word in the dictionary. Cybersecurity has never been more staggeringly full of solutions to choose from, and many of them try to lock their customers into a proprietary, vendor-specific ecosystem. Customers need solutions that focus on integrations, as no one product can provide an answer to every problem in the security space. The freedom to choose a solution without worrying about 10 different management dashboards is something every cybersecurity professional needs in the fast-paced cat-and-mouse game of threat intel. What’s more, customers want to use security solutions that give them the freedom to deploy anywhere and be protected everywhere, especially in the cloud.
More Observations from the Inside
I asked my colleagues for their thoughts on the conference, and they had some interesting thoughts and observations to share.
- John Donnelly, Chief Revenue Officer
“There was the expected buzz around AI and its impact on security on the show floor. Many of the conversations I had revolved around how we can establish guardrails – if we can. In terms of other investments, it seems security budgets continued to go up a little this year. I also heard that although cloud is growing rapidly, there are still investments in data centers happening.”
- Shahzad Ali, Vice President of Solutions Architecture
“The pressing need to bridge the cloud security gap is not just a challenge; it’s an opportunity for innovation and transformation. My dialogue with numerous RSA Conference attendees underscored the significance of the Aviatrix Certified Engineer (ACE) Program, and specifically the ACE Security track, which validated our approach – education and certification that address real-world challenges and enable real-world successes.”
- Joseph Davolos, Solutions Architect
“RSAC attracts some of the sharpest minds in the realm of cybersecurity. This was such a fantastic week of interacting with security practitioners of all backgrounds, and levels of experience. Our hope and role at the conference was to introduce ourselves to the security audience and educate them on how we believe security should be and can be delivered in the cloud. Distributed firewalling is a new concept to many, and we were provided the opportunity to showcase what we feel will change the fundamental design of public cloud networks. With that, there was no shortage of interest and curiosity around Aviatrix’s approach and Ifeel we accomplished what we set out to do at RSAC. We are excited to continue building our offerings out and solidifying our mission to provide the absolute best solution on the market.
The Takeaways
Above all, RSAC served as a reminder of the ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape. As providers, we must adapt and evolve our solutions to ensure that our customers can protect the integrity and privacy of their own data as well as their customers’. Aviatrix commits itself not only to innovation but also towards partnering with other providers and customers to address their security challenges. Our goal is to build resilient, modern infrastructures that meet the needs of businesses and safeguard the privacy of people’s data.
I want to close by saying that despite the fact that my main focus has always been networking, and now cloud networking, I very nearly diverged to cybersecurity when looking at degrees to pursue a couple years ago. I was a firewall jockey (among other things) in the enterprise space and I always loved the mission of threat intel, detection, and prevention. RSAC rekindled some of that for me, especially when talking with so many professional threat hunters. I look forward to doing it again next year.
Missed our presentations? Let’s keep the convo going. Schedule a meeting or get a live demo here: https://resources.aviatrix.com/rsac-2024
