The RSA conference held in San Francisco revolved around cloud security mainly. RSA chairman Art Coviello gave his view on information security and emphasized that cooperation between companies is the key to best practices and mentioning the term ‘cooperative ecosystems’.

‘We now recognize the limitations of perimeter defenses, and the need for information-centric security having become conventional wisdom … [However] to be cost-effective, security infrastructures must be grounded in a thorough understanding of risk, balancing the elimination of threats with materiality and probability’

The virtualization of technology is inevitable in creating protection methods against information threats. Getting down to businesses, RSA signed a partnership with McAfee to deliver IT security services.

‘Security is maturing into a model that requires an intelligent platform that can harness raw IT and security data and deliver a single view of risk to organizations that is correlated and is meaningful to the business … Together, RSA and McAfee are committing to a path of bringing new ideas, best practices and proven solutions designed to help organizations take a risk-based approach to apply business-aligned security controls in the enterprise.’

Another novelty from the RSA Conference comes from Symantec and their updated versions of Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition (currently in beta), two products intertwining high levels of protection and system performance.  Modulo also announced their Modulo Risk Manager’s availability in the cloud and Qualys introduced its QualysGuard IT security and compliance Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) suite of applications in the cloud.

With all this serious talk and gatherings on information security and information threats, it seem ludicrous that HBGary is not capable of managing its own affairs in terms of security so as to have its computer system hacked. Following the cyber-attack, information on a release for the RSA conference on social media and network vulnerabilities was leeched. As ridiculous as this situation might seem, it is obvious that such companies must be adaptable and alert to threats that are becoming more and more sophisticated.